


Everlasting Light

by thetoastlives



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Isolation, M/M, Marco is a forest hermit with expressive aphasia, Marco's POV, Mental Illness, Trauma, erwin is a shitty cop, gratuitous scenery porn, i did a butt load of research but the witness protection stuff is only like 40 percent right, jean is in witness protection and bad at hushing up, past character death (OC), past drunk driving, past prison, the dogs are amazing and well featured, there will be crying, ugly crying
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-10-17
Packaged: 2018-03-11 13:59:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 34,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3328934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetoastlives/pseuds/thetoastlives
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time he met Marco Bodt, Jean Kirschstein thought he was meeting a prophet.</p><p>You couldn’t blame him- not really.  Marco radiated warmth. Comfort. His smile was brighter and more pure than any halo, his eyes were a sweet puppydog chocolate brown that could make your insides melt.  His skin was the color of pine cones and acorns and Hazel Fay flowers in window boxes and ochre red clay deposits in local rivers, peppered with summer tanned stars we call “freckles”.  His little longer pieces of just barely red toned black hair would sway at the front when he got excited and moved too much, like the mommy curl every newborn mother had in every film where she held her child for the first time.  His voice was not as deep or as rich as his strong jawline and broad shoulders suggested, nor as scholarly or varied as the part of his hair and the clever quirk of his brow hinted- but it was full, it was familial, it was light and high like music and as comforting as a warm hand in a snowy wilderness.  </p><p>This is the story of how Marco convinced him he was real.</p><p>**this work is now on indefinite hiatus as of 5/15/2016.**</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Birds of North America

Marco throws his shoulders back, bringing the weight of his axe around easily.  His favorite part is the momentum- the feeling of inertial and centripetal force battling in his shoulderblades and elbow, the steel of his wrist as he brings back danger and work and then brings it down to half a piece of wood that will work towards warming 5 sweetheart dogs and a barely communicative freckled human companion.  There’s something more spiritual, more calming, about chopping wood than there is about bell hopping or wearing suits on subways or any other number of things Marco has done in the past.  There’s the forest that welcomes him like kin- brilliant pine green like he has never seen, russet clay ground that matches his skin, shining bright sun that gives him a halo of warmth no matter the weather.  There’s the way he can feel the wood peeling apart and smell the fresh inner dryness as it splits, perfect- the satisfying ache in his back after a hard day’s labor, the way his creaking bones reminded him of the way he’s carved out his own life.  The contrast, between crisp, brisk outer air and the crackling, smiling warmth of a fire he made himself.

The solitude with which his career allows him to live is both pleasurable and terrifying.  He knows, rationally, he can take on any burglars that manage to find a cabin so far out the nearest electric company laughed and told him they couldn’t even locate him, much less string him through.  He knows, rationally, he is a large man with an axe who only turns up in town to vote and for a yearly supply trip and otherwise lives completely off grid, and that no one here that ever sees him recognizes him from 10 year old news stories or immediately following criminal trials.  He knows, rationally, he’s about as safe as he can be when he’s forty minutes by helicopter to the nearest hospital, which doesn’t even have a landing pad.  He also knows, though, the way his voice sounds funny when he calls in his dogs at the end of a day where he didn’t realize he had yet to speak.  He knows waking up at dawn and going to sleep two hours after sundown because he wants to use the day as effectively as he can before having to do the money making, tax paying work he does without wasting too much electricity.  He knows throwing out the remains of a deer carcass and rotted home grown radishes because of an unsurprising lack of people to cook for.

Marco leans the axe against his chopping block and piles all his wood into the wheelbarrow he’s been using for the past five years without fail, and feels the momentum of the slightly uneven, rickety old wheel in the tendons of his slightly less tanned inner forearm, in the wheedling of his prosthetic against the place where his stump rests.  Out here, physical labor never hurt him.  It was like every creak on the rusty bolt lynch pinning this organization together, every swing of an axe he wished his father taught him how to use, every breath of fresh, mountain air, worked towards unwinding the vice that sutured his lungs to his tightening, anxious shoulderblades.

Stella, an aged, arthritic, white-at-the-nose german shepherd Marco picked up from a retiring policeman, lifts her head from her trodden earth spot where she had been watching Marco chop wood.  Her bones were too tired and her step too wobbling for her to run with the others, but Marco had been well paid in past small dead birds (and on one occasion, a mostly dead fox and a need to stitch up her front haunches) and didn’t feel the need for her to socialize as much with new acquisition, a bloodhound runt he’s named Luna and traded for a pair of hand carved bookends on his last trip to town, a pup who Stella has taken to crowding away from the other dogs and snuggling up to.  He had needed a tracking dog for a while- the newfies were far too playful to do much more than fishing, despite their size, the greyhound could follow sound more than smell, and Stella was too old to go on the search for dinner anymore.  Luna was a godsend.  Stella’s big, clever eyes look like they hear Marco’s thoughts and grant him sage like approval.  Marco smiles at her warmly as he starts stacking the wood he’s chopped, and she rests her head on her crossed paws again.

Marco presses and rejiggers his new pieces until they slot in with the others.  He’s been clearing out more lawn for himself recently thinking about finally caving and getting a cow or a goat or something that he could milk.  He had had chicken a few winters ago, and he decided then he was not one for farm animals, but he figured that the Newfoundlands would love to make friends with an animal that wasn’t a dog or something Marco would have to shoot, and he had been enjoying the runner ducklings he raised and set loose.  He got eggs and the occasional chicken similar roast out of the deal, and they weren’t afraid of him in the slightest, so they didn’t flee as far as the predators did when he moved out here.  If he could get something that wouldn’t just act dumb while something ate it and that could keep around Stella, at least, he thinks he could handle it.  There’s bonus points if its grass fed and he doesn’t have to worry about trying to grow grains.

Marco finds, when he looks up at the sharp tops of the pine trees nearest to his cabin, his eyes don’t tear up in protest of high sunlight- he estimates he has an hour and a half or so until he needs to call the dogs in for dusk and start doing his spooking rounds at the perimeter of his living area.  It wasn’t that he had a particular problem with the foxes and mountain lions and what have you that liked to roam around, but he was a little more antsy about it than usual because he was, after all, raising a puppy.  He could only imagine what little Luna getting torn up by the grizzly he’s been trying to track down would do to Stella, who was happy to finally have another female and had taken her on as a kind of underling/daughter type pup.  

Marco sniffs, wiping at his near frozen nose briefly and pushing up his shirtsleeves, rolling waffle undercloth over thick flannel as he pats his hip and nods his jaw towards the cabin for Stella to follow.  She takes a little longer each passing day to get up and lunk over to Marco, and he tries not to worry about having to pick up a new dog soon.  Stella had always been good to him, even when he only had the Newfies and had no idea how to discipline them.  She was an old girl, but she had always been a great one, and all the reserved praise she ever wanted was a good scratch behind her ears.  Marco obliges as she shoulders his left thigh, yawning with curling black lips and a dry pink tongue before looking at him expectantly.  He smiles briefly and gets moving.  She had learned early on that his right hand was less soft, less warm than the left, and that this was not the hand from which she should catch praise.

He wheels the remaining firewood into the house, working it up the two porch stairs with as much effort as Stella puts into climbing them, and then taking it in armfuls to the stash he keeps indoors for the evening.  He’s finished all of what he wanted to today, and he’s got a good amount of time, so he lets Stella settle into her favorite indoor spot- a pile of pelts he’s been holding onto for the right buyers- and then grabs his latest whittling project and moves out onto his front porch. It isn’t much- he’d built it himself after reading a scene where a man much like him sat on his porch in a rocking chair and decided to build himself a porch and a rocking chair.  The porch itself didn’t match the wood from the rest of the house, but the rocking chair was another case altogether, a blonde wood he’s found a lot further south and that was probably not entirely legal for him to take.  Marco settles into the chair he’s fashioned himself, and looks out onto the land lit by the sun hiding just behind the roof of his home.  He’d had the house build to face the sun as it rises- he wanted as much natural light as possible to lessen the load the small and sturdy solar generator he’d built himself had to bear.  He watches the trees rustle a bit in the distance, waiting to see if he’s going to have any uninvited forest guests he never has, before he looks down at the dark edged wood he’s been carving into his mother’s face, or at least, what his mother looked like on the picture of her he hung above his desk.  Other than his freckles, he looked nothing like her- she was blonde, all curves and all kind.  Marco had strong features- he was tall, stocky.  He had always wished he looked more like his mother, though.  He wanted to have more of a connection with her than he did.  It was a major regret in his life.

Dusk starts setting in sooner than usual- Marco expects this, the days are growing shorter.  He doesn’t pause in his carving as the sky grows the grey it gets in preparation of the canvas where brilliant oranges and pinks paint themselves behind the silhouettes of black, sharp trees.  He is about to call in his canine family and proceed with his evening duties when a sound he hasn’t heard in so long breaks the silence and he drops his portrait, cracking it in half.  

His phone was ringing.

* * *

There are a very limited number of people who call first, Marco reasons.  He watches the faint green light blink fervently against a dark grey number he doesn’t have memorized- it couldn’t be any of his friends, because of the lack of a recognized area code, and it couldn’t be a new corporate number for his psychiatrist, Carla, who calls during the time of month where he has to spill urine around his perimeter, who calls only during the time of day when the sun is high in the sky because she thinks it is in his benefit to have a break.  It couldn’t be his mother- or the funeral home which was exasperated with his insistence his 17 year old younger brother have charge of the arrangements, which did not understand that he could not handle seeing all the people who loved her seeing him in the same place, which _did_ understand the thousands of dollars he mailed after a second, extra trip into town to sell his excess meat, crop, and woodworks.  It couldn’t even be David, the brother in question, who wanted nothing to do with Marco and had called him three times in the duration of Marco’s exile from humanity.  

His ears buzz, frantic, against the unwelcome noise polluting their solitude, against the harsh deafening electric noise of the telephone he didn’t want.  His fingers tremble in a way they never do when he holds a rifle, and he presses them into the edge of the cherry wooden table a local restaurant gifted him after he gave them thirty pounds of bear meat he didn’t want to transport back home.  He can stay still, sure, when he digs plots for his vegetables, when he swings an axe sharp against a hundred year old growth in the earth, when he kills his dinner, when he skins Bambi and boils his organs and feeds them to his dogs.  But now, of course now, they feel frantic and unsure as they brush against the phone that has been called four times in a row by a number who wants an answer too badly to let him loose.

When he manages to work the black plastic off of the table, when he battles against the impossible to press rubber green button to speak, when he carries it the everest to his face, his voice catches in his throat like it was a mac truck running 80 miles an hour into the sturdy nighttime trees that mark the end of a country road and force it into a jagged, violent shape.

“Hello?” says a voice that is calm, that is powerful, that Marco still has nightmares hearing.

Marco breathes a little harder and grips the phone.  He is still in the process of unclogging his voicebox, having gone unbearably rusty after a bath in tears and years without frequent use.

“I realize that this may not be the best way for me to forcibly insert myself into your life, but I need a favor.”

Marco’s brain is moving around too fast in his skull and it aches.  His eyeballs feel like they are vibrating against each opposing apex of his lids and suddenly he has an amount of slime in his gullet that he couldn’t have forseen.  He makes a small croaking noise and wants to die if that is the only progress he can make.

“Marco.”

Marco licks his teeth and clenches them and closes his eyes and presses his free thumb tight into a fist as he takes a breath.

“Marco, I am trying to-”

“Wait.”

Marco’s eyelids flutter and he forces some of the panic out of his shoulderblades, taking a deep breath and looking at Stella, who has picked up her head with careful, aged concern and cocks it ever to gently, a look of sympathy and encouragement and question in her clever round eyes.  He looks to the unlit fireplace he has had the strength to fuel for 8 years without aid, and to the mantle pieces he has built himself, and to the buck horns from the largest, most elegant deer he has ever hunted and didn’t mean to kill, and then finally to the place on the wall where his mother hangs and he takes another breath.

“Marco? Are you alright? I can call another time, if this is-” he pauses, blowing out, ”Too much?”

Marco’s lips quiver in response and he makes a small coughing noise in his throat and then opens his mouth.  Erwin has been waiting for a response for a very long time now, no matter how the world races beyond Marco and his little stopping place in time in the middle of solitary, isolating northern woods.

“I said “Wait”.”

He can feel Erwin growing more impatient as Marco shifts on his feet and tries to put together the right words for whatever was happening.  He no longer knows how to conduct small talk, and he is certainly not prepared to deal with the man with a golden tongue who is inexorably connected to his past failures (including, actually, his loss of a trial), with a man who betrayed him and then tried to visit him in prison, with a man who stopped trying to visit him in person after Marco took him off of the allowed visitors list in prison and failed to make contact after getting out.

Marco takes another deep breath, and swallows, and then looks at the end table.

“Go.”

“I’m sorry, where?”

Marco pauses again, blinking slow and shifting as the muscles in his back steel up.  He hates the question in Erwin’s voice- the way Erwin is trying to baby his answers out of him like he’s a little kid, like Marco didn’t make sense and didn’t understand.

“You, um. Favor. Your favor.” The words roll off his tongue, bright and unsure and he wishes he could come off terse instead of as if they are crawling off of his awkward diving board tongue a syllable a time like they are just discovering walking.

This time it is Erwin who pauses, and Marco can hear too loud shuffling of papers and too loud breathing and too loud typing as Erwin brings something up on whatever he has at his desk, probably a different desk than the one Marco sat on the other side on, pleading for appeal.

“Yes, the- it’s a big one.”

“It is you.”

There’s another pause, but this time it is quiet, and Marco realizes that Erwin wants him to elaborate.  Marco isn’t sure he knows the words, and so he lets the silence sit until he wants to vomit before he says anything else.  He hates talking after the accident more than he hates anything- he can write the same way as before, but he can only hear out of his left side and he couldn’t give speeches or converse like he always had.  The aftermath had only compounded it.

“You would not- If you could do it, yourself, I would not... You would not ask.”

Erwin hums, and Marco convinces himself that the tone being carried is condescension and disappointment and shame, and he wants to hang up so badly it hurts.  He feels like his brain is racing a mile a minute like a stag who heard him step on the barest branch but it won’t translate into his mouth and no one knows that but him.  He hears Stella’s claws clicking against the hardwood as she comes over to see why he’s so tense and he realizes he needs to start trimming her, if she isn’t going to go out chasing and running and whatever else with the others.  They won’t wear down like that, they’ll-

“Ten years ago that would have been a rather cheerful yes.”

“Ten years- ten years, ago, I- everything, still. Everything was... there.”

There is another humming noise and Marco can feel himself growing the kind of sad and depressed and frustrated he felt that ten years ago when he had connections and both arms and so much pressure he popped.

“Yes, yes I know.  I am still, you know, terribly sorry about everything that happened.  Your mother always told me you couldn’t bear to talk to anyone, so I stayed well enough away, but ah- how is she, your mother?”

“Dead.”

More humming and then Marco remembers the way Erwin would press his lips together when he was in a corner and wanted to turn and back himself out.  Erwin makes the soft sighing noise he makes when he realizes he can’t, the same noise when Marco was sentenced, and then he breaks their thick, oppressive silence.

“I’m terribly sorry to hear that.”

“Favor.”

“Hm?”

“Your favor.”

Erwin licks his lips audibly and tries to let the silence lapse audibly but Marco cannot stand talking on the phone this long, especially not when Stella is rubbing against his legs and the sun is near its setting start.

“I have to- do. I need to finish.  What is the favor?”

He clears his throat.  He hates the terseness in his voice, his inability to soften and elaborate.  But he is still terrified of Erwin, and of everything this “favor” will likely mean, especially if he’s calling personally, christ he’s-

“I work in witness protection.”

“I do not need protect- protecting.”

“You wouldn’t be the one being protected.”

Marco widens and narrows and sets his eyes on a space of wood in his wall he will likely need to stuff with clay as winter approaches.  He is unsure of why he let it go on this long, he’s been shivering at night. He doesn’t know what caused it, but he wants rid of it as soon as he can.  Maybe before, even, he figures out how to trim a dog’s nails.

“Who?”

“His name is Jean, he’s-”

“P-plan, with Carla.  She tells me.”

Erwin pauses for a second too long, and Marco can hear his brain trying to put together the reason for the interruption.  But Marco has not spoken with Erwin Smith since before he finished serving out his time in prison and he feels less of an obligation to him than he does to other people he puts up with panic for, for people who tried to help him when he was completely non communicative, for people who do not talk to him the way Erwin does.

He hangs up.

* * *

 

Once a year, Marco finds himself in town.  He finds himself with a rickshaw he fashioned himself and a pile of pelts and meat and woodworkings and he finds himself with a buzzing in the pit of his belly about having to make sales.

The locally owned furniture store at the beginning of the road usually let him unload any stools, chairs, or end tables he build- they were good sellers, and they appreciated Marco asking for a single mattress and 300 dollars in exchange for good quality, handmade furniture.  Second is the back of a seamstress’s shop, where an aged old man with paper hands likes to buy a good number of Marco’s pelts either for his wife or for the local hunting club- he was absolutely no good with a gun of any kind and couldn’t stalk with his oxygen on, and Marco didn’t mind saving him some pride.  Third is a small town butcher that likes to keep Marco’s canning and meat, when he has it, in stock.  They are a good source of Marco’s income, enough that he can pick up any new supplies he needs.  He stops by city hall with his yearly report, parking the rickshaw with the security guard out front, a nice young man named Reiner who had moved here after having a few too many accidents as a bouncer and who liked to assume Marco was a veteran, no matter how many times he was corrected.  Marco’s real, actual job, is reporting on what happens in his forest.  The reports get thicker and thicker, and the people who aren’t his technical boss, Hanji, are tired of his countless descriptions of different flora and fauna he finds.  Hanji thinks its invaluable to their monitoring of species patterns- Marco thinks he likes having something to structure and record for.

Marco’s next stop is at a tent that hangs from the side of the local hardware store.  He sells the rest of his stuff there- usually the rickshaw, too, if he doesn’t have anything major to bring back.  Today he has a good amount of odds and ends he’s carved- lots of bookends, carved portraits, some doll furniture, knickknacks, figures, some bowls, even.  He lays them out with a care he doesn’t otherwise much exercise, so each piece is a perfect distance from the others, and he sticks small, neon price stickers on each item so he can nod and take money and not betray how easy it would likely be to fluster him into a lower price.  It had been Carla’s idea to use price stickers, the same way it was Carla’s idea to sell these things last so more people would hear he was in town and come to buy from him.  The excess meats and imperfect furniture is what sells first, like it always does- the organic grocery won’t ever take all of what he brings because they sell more cans than they do venison.  People really like Marco’s furniture- especially older couples, people who have seen him in town more and seem to have accepted his lack of salesmanly speech.  Young couples pick up his children’s toys, and his woodcarvings sell here and there. Marco is considering packing up to head to his doctor’s - and then perhaps the diner next door- to round off the day and gift his wares so he won’t have to carry them home.  He makes it a habit to make sure he fills his cart with new things and not with what he hasn’t gotten rid of.  He likes the fresh start.

A young man comes up to Marco’s table, a man with high cheekbones, like Marco’s father, and eyes the color of the wheatgrass peppering plains Marco vacationed in as a child, and dexterous, smart fingers that play blindly across a lit up screen that Marco cannot tell the function of.  The young man blacks out its light with the blink of an eye and Marco feels as if he should be fascinated until the young man looks up and picks up a small carving Marco had made of Stella and runs his thumb over the ridge.

“Do you make phone cases?”

Marco’s lips twitch, and then he shifts, looking around and pressing his tongue to the roof of his mouth briefly.

“No.”

“Mm. Shame, they’d be hella.”

“Thank you.”

Marco’s words are slower than he would like, but the young man doesn’t seem to notice because he just keeps going, putting the carving down on the table again with a small click.

“I‘m coming down here to stay with my cousin, you know. Guy’s got financial problems.”

Marco’s eyebrows twitch in confusion as he brings up his shoulders slightly, trying to figure out what the stranger wants in response when he starts talking again.

“Guy’s name is Marco, you know Marco Bodt?”

Marco licks his teeth a little as the stranger looks up at him.

“I haven’t seen the guy around town, must be a real loner, huh? Come on, don’t be afraid to slander the guy, I won’t tell.”

The stranger quirks his mouth and Marco looks down, rubbing his middle finger and thumb together as he tries to form the right words.

“My name is Marco Bodt.”

The stranger makes a few muddled noises, standing up straighter and looking him up and down, nodding and shaking his head and nodding again before turning on his heel and stomping towards  someone Marco can’t see around the corner.  He hears something about how the stranger should have been told that he was “Marco fucking Bodt” and then he decides maybe now was as good a time as ever to start packing up, before he had to deal with... whatever was happening there.  He piles his woodworkings into his almost empty rickshaw and he tries to ignore the blonde topped head repeatedly leaning over the edge of a nearby building.  He heads off to Armin Arlert’s place of business.

Marco has never much liked going into doctors offices.  Even when he was a little kid, a forever ago that seems like he was a different person, he was violently opposed- as a teenager, he can remember feeling an uneasiness in the pit of his stomach about sitting on that same beige or teal or purple or red elevated cushion and waiting for what he was always sure would be an endless time.  

Armin, though, was always someone he felt a little more comfortable around.  He was around Marco’s age, a new doctor, but he looked much younger.  He let Marco barter jars of jam for appointments (his favorites were the ones Marco made with some of the wild cherries that grew in the thick of summer) and he was more than understanding of Marco’s speech.  Marco liked to think it was a symbiotic kind of a relationship, but bartering didn’t help the good Doctor Arlert with his med school bills or his new apartment or any number of other things.

Marco looks up when a nurse, Connie, comes out of the main office.  Connie was mainly working for the pediatrician that worked in the office across from Armin’s, but he was qualified enough to get extra hours in with Armin and he was content with that.  He always seemed to treat everyone like a kid, because to him, everyone was a kid- playful, in need of entertainment and direction and fun.  It had put Marco off at first, the way he smiled too wide and the way the usually patronizing child smile reached his eyes in the most genuine way Marco had ever witnessed.  Genuine, Connie was, if nothing else, genuine- It was something Marco could appreciate about him.  He herds Marco through the double doors, joking about lollipops and appreciating the small smile that Marco gives him and not saying anything about the way Marco’s tightened shoulders drop when he is away from the other people in the waiting room, who had been staring at him in a way they thought had been secretive after he struggled to say he had an appointment and then sat down too far from them.  He was terrified his smile was too dopey or that his words were too spread or any number of things he couldn’t help.  He always was.

It is another ten minutes before Armin makes his way into the exam room, at least by count of the analog clock on the wall Marco watches a little too interestedly.  Armin has, predictably, not aged a particular lot since the last time Marco came in for a visit, slightly less than a year ago- but his hair is a little longer, brushing the lower part of the nape of his neck instead of the middle, bangs flowing slightly to the side as he must be too busy to get them trimmed and can’t do it himself.   Marco smiles to him in greeting as he pulls up Marco’s chart- something Marco has always appreciated is that Armin spends time filling it out for him.  Marco always gets uncomfortable and ignored with regular nurses, no matter how good, but Armin has a degree of understanding they don’t.  He is patient- he waits, nodding, for Marco’s words to find their way into the slightly too cold examination room, he lets him finish his own words and say what he means.  Marco tells him about an ache in his stump as of late, and the way his urine has been clearer and the way he’s been able to hear almost entirely perfectly out of the right ear again, to which Armin nods and jots and nods some more.

Armin does some of the regular tests he usually does, and then wraps his black cloth around Marco’s arm and starts pumping until it gets tight.  Marco has never particularly enjoyed this test- he’s always a wuss with pressure type pain, and Armin comments that his blood pressure is a little higher than it was last year, and jokes that he should cut down on the funyuns.  Marco laughs and attributes it to stress, and Armin laughs and pats his shoulder and asks him to take off the prosthesis so he can check for anything nasty.  He prescribes some cream for a rather minor yeast growth, and demands Marco pick up a new sleeve for it because the sweat has been giving him jock itch on his elbow.  Marco laughs again and agrees.  He gives Armin five jars of jam and a portrait of the sunset, and gifts the receptionists and nurses with the bowls and etc that he had failed to sell.  They smile and thank him, and he smiles and says nothing before slipping out the door.

He takes his remaining work and enters the Galaxy Diner, where he sits down and piles everything the way he wants and peeks at the menu.  His favorite part about this particular diner is that they are dry- as in, he doesn’t have to see alcohol.  Marco has a vow never to drink again, and he intends to keep it.

Mikasa, one of the two grown children of the long passed Grisha Jaeger whose life insurance financed the acquisition of the establishment, comes to take his order.  She gives him water, and nods and jots down what he points to on the menu with embarrassed, smiling words.  He sends her off with a carving of the moon, and she thanks him sagely before walking to the other end of the diner to catch the order of the two men sitting several rows away from Marco’s booth.  When she returns with his milk, he sends her back with a wooden bowl for their cook and a spoon for her mother and a carving of a fire for her brother, Eren, as well as the carving of Stella the stranger had been admiring and a small wooden church model for the strangers at the end of the restaurant.  All Marco really had left after that was a fat stack of bills and a small flute a little kid had broken and left behind, and he figured he could throw that out at the end of his late lunch before heading out to get his supplies and then back home for dusk.  

But then, as the strangers are given their carvings, one of them stands up rather abruptly.  Marco isn’t sure why he seems so... infuriated, he would guess, but he can’t handle being yelled at and he shrinks down below his booth as the man stomps over.

The woodcarving slaps onto the table like a belly flop and the stranger leans over Marco.

“How did you know?” The voice is only gently familiar, toned with the roughness of cigarettes and late nights and leather train seats.

Marco curls further into himself, retracting into his collarbone like he’s a turtle and like hiding from the world would work out any better than it has so far.

“No, seriously!”

Marco licks his lips, eyes still trained on the table as he makes a small humming noise.

“Bodt, seriously. Come on.”

Marco gives his too loud visitor a sidelong glance- he catches moonlight skin and green gold prairie grasses swaying in hazel eyes and high cheekbones _like his father’s_ and-

“I- I do not... How did I know what?”

The stranger plops down in the booth across from him, and Marco catches the cigarette stench he suspected was carried on the voice.

“Bullshit.  No, really-”

“I do not-”

“That it was me!”

This is when Marco finds it in himself to look at the stranger that speaks like he means to talk over the earth instead of with it.

“I- I did not know.”

“Oh, so you just, what, give shit away when you want to pack up and go home?”

“...yes?”

The stranger is smiling, mouth gently quirked to the left as he looks at Marco in a way Marco is not used to being looked at.  Marco brings hook and hand to rest curled, unsurely, over the edge of the sleek, deep brown, wooden diner table as the stranger shifts in his seat and prepares a response.

“I, uh- I can respect that.  What, gotta save room for the trip back?”

Marco sits up, looking at the stranger a little closer.  Marco is unsure how much information the stranger had gathered before sitting down.  He feels like he is the one who should be giving the interrogation.

“I- yes, yeah.”

Marco knows the second the stranger’s companion huffed, and he can sense him stalking forward before he decides to.

“That’s, you know, really cool.  What do you usually, you know, get, on the way back?”

“Um- tissues? New... tools, wire, canning.  Other... Supplies.”

“Notice you have a mattress.”

“I-”

Marco pauses to try and get a visual on the man stalking forward impatiently.  He is a little surprised to see silver eyes like the linings of clouds and black sheets of hair like painted strips of paper.  Marlowe- he hasn’t seen him since the trial.  He had been Erwin’s intern at the time.  He guessed he had followed Erwin to the next organization he joined.

“Jean, stop bothering the guy! Seriously, he’s-”

Marlowe looks at Marco, now, and then at his hook hand and at his facial scarring and at the uncomfortable quirk of his mouth and he sits down, pressing his lips before opening his mouth and speaking slowly, as if to a child.

“Hello, Marco.”

Marco swallows, looking at the stranger, presumably Jean but not assuredly, and then at Marlowe again.

“Which carving did you get?”

Marlowe’s eyebrows twitch as he glances back at the possibly Jean stranger and then trains himself tiredly at Marco- as if he is exhausted by having to placate him, as if he is the one doing a chore by speaking.  Marco’s lips press and reset themselves politely.  He had always hated the weight of Marlowe’s eyes on his shoulders.  Worse, during the trial, but still now like a platinum molded gavel waiting to bring judgement down on his soft, withering skull.

“The church.  It was very-”

Marlowe jolts and Marco almost doesn’t immediately realize that the likely Jean stranger has kicked him.  Probably Jean looks at Marco with something remotely apologetic.

“Sorry about that.  Marlowe’s a fucking idiot who doesn’t know how to talk to a grown ass man.”

Marco conceals his responding smile by licking his lips and picking up his coffee as Mikasa puts it down, scanning Possibly Jean and taking a sip.

It was a long evening, but not an unfruitful one.

Marco made a friend.

* * *

 

Two days before the thinnest moon Marco expects to see until after it grows full, there is a sound in the forest Marco has not heard in a very, very long time.  It is a growling, a rumbling, that he was once accustomed to. There is a careless breaking of branches and Marco can hear of a long ways off because he can also sense the fleeing of animals in his direction and to the north of him.  He will have trouble hunting the next couple of days, and if he weren’t terrified he would be disgruntled about it.

He expects his guests will arrive at noon, when the sun is highest, and he hopes this is the case because it means that he can examine whoever is so carelessly chasing away the wood in the full light of daytime.  He also hopes this, perhaps, because he does not want it to be people who he does not need to examine, people he has seen and known or can trust to be learned in time.  And so, with this in mind, he calls in the dogs mere hours after he sent them off.  Fritz, the greyhound, is of course the first to arrive, as Stella hadn’t left.  The Newfoundlands, Rufus and Pratt, come in shortly after Luna, which gives Marco a small sense of pride in her as she leads.  He understands, now, why Stella had taken her under wing so aggressively.  Luna would be the new leader, sage, and matriarch, when Stella had prepared enough for her passing to pass.  Marco catches a wise, proud twinkle in her eye from beneath an overhang in the porch that confirms his reasoning.

He has finished chopping wood for at least until he sees a half moon, but he fears he won’t have time to hunt game for dinner today and so he sets aside some of the stew he’d made of aging vegetables and a larger deer he hunted, although it meant he would have to catch another larger game so he could can more stew and that was a day and sometimes a night of labor.  He didn’t so much prepare for company as much as he got antsy for it- the most he had done as of yet was build another bunk onto his bed for sleeping quarters, and he had yet to clear a space for his personal items or what have you.  Marco didn’t like to think about why he had to do any of those things, but if he spent some time on it he would likely realize it was because he didn’t want Jean to be coming so soon.  But there is something Marco was and always has been- more than kind, reassuring, sure of himself, social, handsome, charismatic, any of the things that come and go fleetingly in his life, he is a man of his word.  And regardless of the ease with which he could go back on the favor he agreed to, the understanding that rationally and logically he knew would be there, he could not bring himself to go back on a promise or a truth, no matter what the court or his peers independently decided of his character so many years ago.

The Newfoundlands have been growing restless since Marco called them in.  They listen to him- they all do, especially under the careful gaze of Stella, their true disciplinarian- and then nose around, but Marco can feel the energy buzzing in their bones.  They don’t much like the way Stella always herds Luna away from them to preen at her and press her face into her haunches, and they also don’t like the lack of an afternoon activity.  None of the dogs, regardless of how warm and soft they grow at the end of the day, are content with being cooped up and with a lack of activity, the same way Marco is.  Fritz, the greyhound, is still, by far, the worst of them when it comes to staying within an area with nothing to do.  He runs restlessly in circles, racing in and out of the cabin in attempt to get Marco to stop doing everything he doesn’t want to be doing.  He goes under the porch and shoots out like a threatened, hungry snake out of its hole, riling up Luna and earning a warning yip from Stella, and he is absolutely no help in the calming of Rufus and Pratt, who only get more rambunctious under the horrendous influence of Fritz’s mutinying Stella.  Marco had forgotten how good it was to have them all together like this- it had been a harrowing autumn, in preparation for the apocalyptic winter the ache in Marco’s stump had been forewarning, and he hadn’t let them play around him in a very, very long time.  

The rumbling in the woods, though, likely contributed to their excitement.  It had been likely too long for any of them to remember anyone but Marco making a rumbling like that, and by now the sound of the vehicle was so loud Marco wouldn’t be surprised if whoever was trampling the laws of his land was going to breach his inner sanctum in ten or fifteen minutes.  Anyone who came was generally specifically advised to make it a trek from after where the asphalt ended- clearly, whoever was in the car hadn’t realized that custom.  That worried Marco- the lack of concern these people were showing for the forest and for Marco’s forest.  They were chasing away his food, trampling his home, making the birds rise up and leave their nests in fear.  Animals this far out were terrified of people, they weren’t housecats like the coyote you see rummaging garbage cans, they weren’t seagulls that would swoop down and take fries out of your hand.  They were delicate, shifty, and these people didn't realize just what kind of a spooking they were doing in their big black car with big black exhaust that only they could not smell.

Marco was not wrong about when they arrived- he estimates that the second the big black car pulled up had to be just before noon. Marlowe Freudenberg, as he glances at the digital clock built into his dirt clad company car, knows it is 11:46 am.  

Marco knows, immediately, when Marlowe is looking at him.  He definitely knew when they arrived, when Marlowe got (noisily) out of the car, when the dogs got on the defensive and attempted to attack the unfamiliar smell with growling teeth and Marco whistled them off.  But he felt, physically, the second Marlowe turned his righteous silver gaze on Marco and the arm Erwin paid for him to have, resting on the counter like meat.  It is like a hunting knife, boring into his skin and prying apart his shoulder blades so that his entrails can spill out his spine and leave his belly clean.  Marco takes a deep breath with the lungs that feel as if they have slipped out and hit the floor, and they burn, and he turns around.

There is the slam of a car door and some grumbling, and Marco winces at how loud this young man is as he jams on his prosthetic, the fancy one Erwin had made for him immediately after the accident that he keeps in a case under his bed in favor of the non electric hook like one, and makes his way slowly, shakily, toward his... guests.  

Marco knows why people treat him the way they do- he has a stitched up line down the front of his face that stems from a degree of success with skin grafting that was deemed “miraculous”, he’s missing an arm on that same side, he can barely communicate and speak- there’s no wonder people talk to him like he has the mind of the four year old, Marlowe included.  He very obviously has brain damage, but it never destroyed the ‘Marco’ parts of his brain or the parts that made him think, it just kept him from being able to carry the word “Expressive Aphasia” from his anxiety addled brain into his disconnected mouth and through his broken lips.

Marlowe turns toward him, failing to answer Jean, and puts out a hand.

“Erwin sends his greetings.”

“Carla did not call.”

Marlowe pauses, shifting and glancing at the cabin behind Marco and the dogs and the nervous steel of Marco’s shoulders with a sympathy Marco doesn’t want to see.  Marco wishes his voice was not the kind sounding one it was- he wished he could make Marlowe scared enough of him to think he is defensive and not an idiot.

“I don’t know why she didn’t.  She told Erwin noon “around the end of the lunar cycle”, and I figured her driving instructions were her blessing.”

Marlowe is too familiar, he speaks too slowly, in a way that gets under Marco’s skin.  Marlowe is a neither sharp nor grouchy man, but with elements of both- he is unbearably proffessional with other people and now, now this kindness is because he is treating Marco like a child- _again, again, again_.  Marco does not want him to be here, he does not want anyone to be here, especially not someone who disregards waxing or waning and who does not understand what Carla meant and who does not know how to adjust his noise to the forest’s and who again _again again_ uses the above Marco voice, the “you can’t understand normal tones” voice that Marco hates so much he can almost, just almost, force his stifled scream from the invisible wiring in his teeth and the politeness clogging his trachea.

“It is _beginning_.”

Marlowe moves his eyebrows up and cocks his head slightly, exaggerating his movements like he needs a baby to be able to comprehend them, and it frustrates Marco to no end that he can’t go off on how wrong he is because of the way his words are catching in his throat.  It is Jean who saves him.

“Of the lunar cycle? Seriously, Freudenberg, get your shit together.  Google something every once in a while, christ.”

Jean looks up at Marco now, with a scowl that scares and comforts Marco at the same time.  Marco wipes the owlish surprise-thanks from his eyes and nods in gentle agreement.

“What’s the wifi password anyway? I don’t even have 2G anymore.”

Marco pauses now, glancing at Marlowe, who looks like this is definitely not how he wants to be conducting this exchange, and then more curiously at Jean.

“I am not- what is...”

Marco swallows.  He feels vaguely like he should know what 2G and wifi are- Jean said them so easily he thinks maybe they are basic utilities like toilets and electricity.  He presses his lips together and then Jean looks back up from his glowing screen with something between impatience and petulance.

“Do you not use internet?”

Marco shakes his head, unsure of himself, before shifting on his feet.

“I am not- I have not used the internet for a very long time?”

Marco hadn’t taken computer classes in high school, before the accident.  He had (barely) gotten his GED in prison, yes, but he never really got to use anything to do with expensive machines like that.

Jean turns to Marlowe.

“I was not told I was going to be living like a 20s lumberjack”

“Set up a dial up connection, it isn’t hard.”

Marlowe brushes off the rest of the line of interrogation from Jean, and looks to Marco, clearly a little offended that he hadn’t shook the proffered hand.

“It took a significantly longer time to drive up here than it would have taken to walk, I imagine, and so I really, really do need to get going-”

Jean makes a small disgusted noise and shifts again, impatient like all of the dogs, and Marco grunts in response, staring at Marlowe defensively.  Marlowe gives them both a small noise that is almost a goodbye but like he wants to be less familiar than politeness allows, and then he is in his car and driving back in a way that will ensure Jean some hunger if he eats more gluttonously than Marco expects.

“Fucking hate that guy, stick up his asshole so far it pushes all his bullshit out his mouth.”

Marco looks back at Jean, whose glowing screen seems to have disappeared and who is looking at him like he can just... conduct a conversation.  Like it’s that _easy_.

“I do not... like anyone.” Marco says with a higher, liltier tone.  Jean does not put him on edge the same way Erwin and Marlowe do- he is genuine, and he is colloquial in a way that means respect and not a lack thereof, and Marco thinks he can deal with that.

Jean snorts, putting his hands in his pocket and looking around to the trees and then glancing down at the dogs slightly fearfully.  Marco thinks that’s a little ridiculous- the only ones really still out for blood are Luna and Stella, but they’re collectively both too old and too young to bring him any kind of harm.

“Tell me about it.  I mean, you do totally live out in the middle of fucking nowhere, so maybe there is a degree of difference between our collective hatred of humanity, but hey.”

Marco hums in response, trying to catch a smile to play at the corner of his mouth the way he wants it to, but its hard when Jean is looking at him.

“I know we already did the self introduction shit in town, but Jean Kirschtein, at your service.”

“Jean, yes, Marco. I am, um- My name is Marco. Marco Bodt.”

Jean cocks an eyebrow and then his head, running his tongue over his teeth like they need to be cleaned before they can say anything.

“Hey, so it’s a hell of a way to town, were you going to back go up there any time soon?”

“If you... need something?”

Marco blinks and waits for a response, but then Jean is just smiling like Marco has said something funny when he knows he hasn’t.  Jean moves to pick up a duffle bag and a hiking backpack and then starts moving toward Marco in a way that makes Stella growl until Marco pats her head.

“So who are you, anyway? I mean other than Paul Bunyan, America’s Sweetheart”

Marco’s eyebrows take their turn to be emotive and twitch before he starts moving to follow Jean into his own house.

“I am... Marco?”

Jean snorts again.

“No, no like... _who_ are you? Like hobbies, job, least favorite 80s pop nostalgia hit.”

Jean pauses when he sees the inside of the rather barren cabin, and then shrugs and drops his duffel to the floor and places the hiking bag more gingerly next to it.  He turns back to Marco and Marco realizes Jean expects a legitimate answer.

“I like... wood?”

Jean raises his eyebrows and makes a face like he might laugh, and when he doesn’t the edges of Marco’s mouth turn up ever so slightly.

“I mean... I built, everything. I sell, wood... art? And, I hunt, a lot. I like... dogs, dogs also.”

Marco sits down on the rocking chair he dragged in from the porch and Jean takes the initiative to sit on Marco’s old armchair.  He sinks down and Marco sees the comfort in the flutter of his eyelids.

“Alright, big boy, we have dogs, and wood, and killing animals.  Anything else?”

“Books. I like to read.”

Jean nods, shifting more and then crossing his legs to sink in further.  Marco smiles a little more in spite of himself.

“And you- you like my chair?”

“Fuck, I _love_ your chair.”

Marco starts working off the robotic arm Erwin bought for him.  It itches his skin at the edges, makes it like pins and needles like the first year after the accident.  

“Don’t tell Erwin that I don’t like his arm.  It was... Expensive.”

Jean hums and Marco glances at him.

“Also, Disco sucks.”

Jean laughs.

 


	2. A Small Place

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jean and Marco get close. No real plot- lots of descriptions, ugly crying, and failure to remember capping the caulking gun. Wood nymph fuckery be advised.

Rufus and Pratt are quick out of sleep, always together and always as if they spent all night in waiting for the newly coming day, amazed as the sun is born again and again and they are allowed to live beneath it- Fritz more sluggish, more in need of food, Luna with the shame of failing to rise with Stella, who is always watching Marco with piercing reflective nighttime eyes when his own finally slide open.  When Marco awakens Jean for the day’s work, he is slow in rising to the catch- his eyelids unwilling just yet to part, crusted with dreams, his muscles begging to be left still just yet.  

When he rolls to the edge of Marco’s home fashioned bunk bed, his feet are unsure of their positioning, searching and feeling like they are looking for rock formation footholds and not ladder steps. His eyes are tired and his hair is arranged in ways Marco has not seen hair arranged- cowlicked and curled and sticking out accusingly at all the knotted wooden cabin planks and beams of light that dare defy it.  When he finally touches the fire warming floor, groaning and allowing his body’s complaints at rising out of his barely parted mouth, he reaches his fingers toward Marco’s sturdy roof and his spine crawls with crackles, sleep hissing out as bones knock together in what Marco hopes is wakefulness. The cabin is filled with curling clear smells, winding around everything they cannot pass through and filling round sets of nostrils with competing mixes of burning pine, of ice frozen dawn, of slowly boiling forest caught meat in canned stew that will tide Marco and his guest over until he can hunt.  Stella watches Jean carefully, suspicious of the stranger now living in her ceiling, and does not glance at Marco when he tries to reassure her with a beaming smile and eyes bright from having captured the earliest morning rays of sun.

Jean slides his tongue around the edges of his lips as if to wipe clean the chapped sighs he made in sleep, and lumbers, heels heavy against Marco’s floorboards, to his duffel bag.  He roots out clothes- ones Marco is concerned will not be warm enough, will hinder his movement as he works, but ones that will hear no objection.  It is several minutes before the rustling behind Marco stops and all he can hear is rolling thick fluid in the pot before him and the mixed breathing of two humans and five dogs and the earth that lives beneath his feet.

“Can you fish?”

There is a silence- the accusing gaze of Stella presses against Jean in a way he does not seem to realize, but a way that Marco wishes she would give up.  Rufus and Pratt play their nails against the floor in excitement for entering the forest, Jean takes in air in preparation for speaking, Luna is nosing Stella in Jean’s defense, Marco is concerned for the changing power dynamic and Stella’s obvious concerns of favoritism and the loss thereof-

“I can try.”

Marco looks up again, pressing an unsure smile back into his face as he turns to pour soup into hand carved, fat finished wooden bowls with cheap utensils he picked up his second year in residence with himself.  He nods, preparing his speech.

“Can you hunt?”

“Considerably less than I can fish, I’m guessing.”

Marco hums, offering Jean his protein packed bowl with a nod and a forcible relaxation of the tension drawing his shoulder blades together.

“We will... fish, soon.  And you will learn, learn hunting.  Is that... okay?”

Jean nods, lifting his tarnished spoon to his lips and sitting in the armchair he was reluctant to leave the day before.  Marco is apprehensive about teaching, about whether Jean will understand what he is teaching, about whether he is able to communicate his exact relationship with the red clay sediment under his feet and the time stopping, forever unstill air carrying the smell of pine and cold, about whether Jean will be able to at least pretend he can have the same kind of coexistence with Marco’s stopping point in time.

“Before I learn the river bend, though, Pocahontas, I’d like to have some mealtime expose on Marco the mountain man.”

It takes Marco a second to decipher what Jean is trying to say, and when he does he still isn’t entirely sure he understands.  He takes another bite of his soup to buy himself some time and then settles into his rocking chair.  He is unsure of himself, he is anxious- every muscle in his body is trying to twitch tighter together in fear and he is having trouble determining what they are supposed to rest like anymore.

“I like wood, and books, and dogs, and not disco, not people.  That seems... like enough?”

Jean shakes his head, his mouth changing shape into a more playful final evolution as he resets his thighs in Marco’s armchair and leans his elbow against the padded armrest, letting his empty spoon sit tilted in front of his face for a second before he goes in for sustenance.

“Not if we’re going to be adventurers together, it isn’t.  I need to know in case we accidentally run into an asshole woodland fairy that enchants you for walking too quietly and I have to undo the curse.  Serious business.”

Marco makes his mouth quirk gently in spite of himself, a small output of air acting as a quiet laugh around the mouthful of food and anxiety he is in the process of downing.

“I do not... What did you want to know?”

Jean nods exaggeratedly in mock consideration, tapping his spoon animatedly against his chin in thought before letting boiled boar slide down his gullet so he can speak.  Marco tries to let the familiarity make him more comfortable, but it doesn’t work as much as he would like.

“How long have you been out here?”

Marco nods, jaw setting and resetting and trying to force out an answer with anything near the speed Jean is operating at.  He presses a small amount of sinewy meat caught against his molar with his tongue and then looks up at Jean.

“A... long time.  Eight years, about.”

He nods to himself, shifting and pressing his thumb into his spoon.

“Yes, it has been... about eight.”

Jean seems genuinely impressed, and Marco sits a little more comfortably for the lack of shock or shame.

“How old are you?”

“I am twenty eight. I think.”

Jean nods again, smiling slightly as he scrapes his spoon against the bottom of his bowl on a quest for more solid bits.

“The fact that someone who is 4 years closer to being 30 than I am is in better shape than I am is psychologically distressing.  I’m really feeling my own mortality here.”

Marco nods, offering another small exhale (a small almost laugh) in response as he starts finishing off the rest of his breakfast.  Jean eats incredibly slowly, and Marco is concerned that it says something about his productivity.

“You seeing anyone?”

Marco snorts audibly, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth as his anxiety reminds him full force of his situation and he swallows, licking his lips as he looks away from Jean, resting his bowl in his lap.

“I am... I live alone, in the forest, with... with no running water, and I...”

Jean raises his eyebrows, trying to move his head into Marco’s line of sight, which Marco repeatedly nullifies by looking progressively farther and farther away.

“Wood nymphs with benefits totally count.”

Marco presses his lips shut, drawing up his shoulders against the second snort that forces its way through his wall of terror.

“Look I’m just saying, if there were some hot nymph babes- or studs, no judgement- out there, I would be livid if you weren’t absolutely all over that.”

Marco glances at Jean for about a tenth of a second, an eternity for the hummingbird trapped in Marco’s chest that is violently trying to escape by slamming itself around his ribcage, and then looks at the light filtering through his window through his eyelashes.  He licks his lips and tries to figure out a way to counter Jean, if he is really going to try and carry this on-

“You can... If you find the nymph studs, they can be... just for you.”

Marco tries not to critique the awkward, too slow stumbling of his attempt at banter.  He has not had to have the “no _you’re_ gay” faux argument since he was a teenager and he isn’t sure how to do it anymore. But the sentiment gets him, the familiarity warms him, the glee curls around the back of his throat until Jean sighs and leans back, leather squishing and sliding against his spine.

“That obvious, huh?”

Marco draws back his head a little, looking to Jean, his... his friend? His bantering friend? His...

“I am... What?”

Jean quirks an eyebrow, flicking his tongue over his lips as he reaches over the melting abyss between the chair and end table to deposit his empty bowl, looking at Marco with something like cajoling confusion.

“I was just teasing, didn’t mean to make it weird.  No hard feelings?”

Marco knits his forehead together as his brain flies over everything, picking at it desperately to look for the piece he missed. He bites the inside of his cheek, drawing in a little before he stands and nods.

“I- yeah, yeah, sorry, I did not- sorry.”

Jean makes a small scoffing noise, pushing his bowl toward Marco as he starts wrestling his sleep wrapped feet into his boots, a slight edge to his brow as Marco wipes clean their bowls and tries, still, to figure out where exactly he went wrong.

* * *

 

Time has passed within the pausing point in Marco’s forest- light filters, dusty and betraying the particles of dust trying to hide as they filter into Marco’s mouth, through the window behind Marco.  Jean watches restlessly- Marco can feel the restlessness fighting to get out from under Jean’s tongue- from the rocking chair.  Marco listens to him crawl his fingernails up the sides of the book he still isn’t reading, making a small noise like a zipper through the air, telling Marco Jean doesn’t know how to care for books.  Marco breathes out, shifting his feet on his rather unsturdy, cotton covered mattress, clicking the lever on his newly purchased caulking gun and pressing the nozzle lightly against the crack in the wall.  

Jean shifts his legs about, breathing in pine smoke tinted air that has long since lost the smell of breakfast, huffing it out so Marco can hear the slow settling rot inside his bored blonde head.  Marco, again, does not reply- he has not spoken to Jean since the night before, and he feels the awkwardness like the first day setting in again.  He knows that Jean has a need for conversation that Marco cannot fulfill, and he knows that he himself wishes he could fulfill it.  But, even still, his words get caught in his throat, all the things he could imagine tumbling out get stuck behind the isolation fueled caulk sticking up his throat the way he sticks up the wall.  Marco presses his lips shut, Stella shifting and looking up at him full of expectation and tiredness.  She has not gotten up from her resting place since breakfast, and Marco is unsure whether it is because she is too exhausted to or because Marco has not left the cabin.

Marco licks his lips, swirling his head back to crack his neck.  He has a knot in it, and anxious little twitch that has accompanied him since Jean’s arrival a few days before, maybe even before then- pain always crept up on Marco, slow like fossilizing sap and the changing of seasons, until he realized he was hurting, the way mosquitos at last lost prehistoric breath in amber or how fall faded into a shock of ice.  The crackle spreads to his spine, below- something always aching but less with time, shivering and moving slightly unnaturally to shake out his tension.  He finishes by reaching out the caulking arm, popping his elbow with a small noise of satisfaction that is followed by a snort that takes him a second to recognize as not being his own.  He recoils, drawing himself back up and looking intensely at the white silicone he presses into the grooves in his wall.

“You’re fucking _tall_ , you know that?”

Marco’s mouth twitches, his tongue resettling as he draws the gun gently downward, the pads of his fingers soft against the slightly too cool plastic of the barrel, his pupils shrunk in a way that aches and a way he knows he cannot fix but damns nonetheless.

“I am... sorry?”

Jean shifts, Marco hears the fabric between his skinny legs as he shifts them around and sees the wonder-bread white blob in his peripheral vision move but does not train his eyes in on Jean the way he knows Jean wants him to do.  Marco draws his tongue over his teeth, pushing up his upper lip as if trying to frighten it into stiffness, swallowing the spit gathering in his mouth as if it is liquid courage.  Jean gives him a few seconds to respond, and Marco would be grateful for them if they didn’t mean he was dysfunctional.  He will, later on, credit Jean with not thinking of him as someone broken, who needed extra time because of an inadequacy- but now, only now, it is all he can think.  Jean breathes in.

“No, like, you go and try to take up this teeny tiny space and shit.  But you aren’t, like, a little, tiny guy- you’re fucking built, I’m jealous.  I mean, shit, man.”

Marco slides his tongue over his lips, now- he always thinks his upper lip more firm when he presses up against it than when he presses the tip of his tongue to the inner wall, where it gives like a mixture of tissue paper and elastic rubber bands.  He watches his caulking gun.

“I am not- I take up the space, that I, you know.  Need.  I do not... I do not need more than that.”

“What, are you afraid?”

The air, within the cabin, will not stir- Marco knows that.  He waits for it, anyway, like the leaves in fall will tumble onto his cabin floor and give him comfort and reprieve from the way he wants to retract into his collarbones like he is a turtle and not a man.

“I am... I...”

Marco swallows, eyes trained on the seam between the red handle and semitransparent white barrel of his caulking gun, as if pleading it to fill in the holes in his head and not just the ones in his wall.  He breathes out slow and lets the ticking of Jean’s silence weigh down on his chest like it is the rocking chair Jean so restlessly shifts on and not the thing holding up Marco’s inadequate head.

“I am... Terrified.”

Jean’s immediate response is a hum.  Marco cannot tell the exact intended meaning of Jean’s hum, nor can he pick it apart until he finds a tone or a color or a criticism- and somehow, that is both good and bad.  Marco swallows his spit again, cracking his toes in his boots and forcing himself to look over at Jean, who is not saying anything but who has ceased the impatient creaking of the rocking chair against the more than oppositional floor.

Jean is smiling.

“I do the same thing is all.  When I get scared.  Curl up like I’m a fucking roly poly, you know?”

“Oh.”

Marco is still unsure whether Jean’s hum is good, the same way he is unbearably confused with Jean’s response.  He senses warmth, in his voice- he hears the sharp edge of self-hatred, he tastes the thin icing of anxiousness on the air the breathes in through his nose, but still he can feel the attempt at relation, the open end of the conversion that Jean has revealed to him so that they can connect at the edges and flow together.  Marco is unsure he is ready to present his end of that bargain- he does not know what HDMI cables are, and so he is not ready to be one.  Jean opens his mouth too quickly, and his lips smack.

“I just meant- I don’t know.  Don’t be so afraid, you know? Like you’re a big guy.  You’re a hunk and you could totally punch my lights out if I took your girl.  No worries, right?”

Marco’s lips twitch at the corners, but only because he makes them.

“I must admit I was... I was very, very worried, about... about you steal, stealing, my wood nymph bride.”

Jean laughs, and it’s louder than Marco was expecting and Jean appears to have surprised himself because his throat closes on it self-consciously and chokes it down to a chuckle.  Marco lets out a small output of breath to try to soothe him back.

“I mean... I am, aware, that you have a preference for... for wood nymph studs, but, um.  Wood nymphs, they, they really like pretty people.”

“Marco, are you calling me pretty?”

Marco is looking at Jean already and it is too soon to avert his gaze, now that he has Marco and his anxiety pinned down like an insect.

“I... I meant-”

“Because I will have you know, I am _gorgeous._  I know you spend all your time chopping wood and molesting the forest, but honestly, buddy, I am insulted as _fuck_ over here.”

Marco covers his mouth with the back of his wrist, hand weighed down by the almost forgotten caulking gun as he lets out what is definately more than an output of air.

* * *

 

“I think I might _actually_ hate this.”

Marco glances at Jean, his fishing line bobbing forlornly in the autumn hibernating river.  Rufus and Pratt are watching the water intently, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice, long black brown fur glinting with excitement against Jean’s complaining groans.  Marco presses his tongue against the insides of his lips, lifting his jug to his mouth for some water before he shifts his legs and clears his throat.

“I am... sorry?”

Jean snorts, but he does not say anything, and Marco lets silence lapse because he does not have anything he knows he can say.  He is not used to talking as much as Jean seems to want to, and as selfish as he knows it is, he cannot bring himself to violate the thick solitude he wants to pretend he still has.  His spine is prickling against Jean’s breath, fifty feet away, and his sides are pressed with the questioning hands of the forest, pine needle nails digging in until they get answers as to why this loud stranger is disturbing her so.  Meek sunlight filters, almost blue, through the brisk morning air- the sun is to Marco’s back, and he suspects it is still far from centering in the sky.  It is too early for boredom, even from someone who does not appreciate silence, and Marco presses his teeth together to quell further thought on it.  He does not mean to resent Jean- he enjoys Jean’s company, just enough to tolerate it.  He knows Jean needs to be here, at least, he knows that Jean is safe here and that the dogs and the forest and Marco himself will come to such a shape that Jean fits into this life like a slightly scrawny puzzle piece.

The birds are returning- Marco can hear a woodpecker a while away, and when he closes his eyes he can sense the deer tentatively moving south towards the river where they generally commune.  He can feel the unsure energy in the air, buzzing like the fireflies that Jean will deem beautiful in the summer and the big black flies that Marco fills his house with garlic to repel that stay whenever Marco can sweat in a t-shirt alone.  Leaves rustle and fall, orange like sunrise and brown like bark, and Marco listens to Jean, for now, breathe out of time with all of it.  Marco licks his lips and opens his eyes and looks at Jean, who is staring with fiery eyes at the river in an attempt to scare fish into his catch.

“Why?”

Jean looks at him, as if startled by the sudden noise of his voice, before he shifts his legs and shrugs.

“‘s boring.”

Marco cocks his head slightly, turning towards him.

“In what way?”

Jean pauses again, looking at the ground next to Marco and sucking his teeth as if he is trying to find the threshold between offending Marco and answering him.  Marco isn’t sure if he’s entirely gotten ahold of that line when he starts speaking, and he isn’t sure he cares.

“There’s- it’s quiet.  There’s not a hell of a lot out here. I’m, I don’t know.  I’m just bored?”

Marco looks down, watching the flowing edges of the river ebb against the red clay sediment dipping so that it can move.  He listens to the breathing of all the trees and the birds and the hiding animals and the beating of a bee’s wings somewhere unseen and he exhales slow.

“I was... I used to be the same way. About the forest.”

Marco sees Jean, blurry in the peripheral, rise up slightly.

“But... but the forest, is alive.  The ground, in the ground, there are roots.  And... and the roots sap water, up through trees.  Up into leaves that the sun touches.”

Marco pauses, moving his chin up so he can look back at the life giving sun.

“It is... they work, together.  The roots, cannot.... they never see light, if they are... trusting, and the leaves, they let the water- the rain, slide off of them.  Even though they... they need the water.  And... and they know, each knows the other, because of... not because of talking, right? Because they do not talk.  But they... they _speak_.  And if you... and if you _listen_ , then you... you can hear it. You can understand... understand the trees, and the ground, and the sun, and you can... and you do not see nothing, anymore.  Because the forest is, the forest is full.”

Marco finally looks toward Jean, at the wheatgrass green in his eyes that contrasts heavily with the evergreen pine wood, and licks his lips as he watches Jean try to absorb what he just said.  Jean does not speak, right away, looking down at the place before his feet and rubbing his thumb over his fishing pole gently.  The turgid air stirs cold weakened leaves beyond their heads, fire falling like autumn behind them in dying praise from the trees that are breathing in their exhaled nerves.  Marco is giving up on his response when he finally hears something from boy with the bearings to become a good man if he tried.

“I grew up in the city, you know?”

Marco’s lips twitch and he tries to collate the open connection in Jean’s tone with the words that are, in their own right, an excuse.  He does not know if he should feel like Jean has ignored him.

“In the city- it’s the same, you know? Everything’s kind of, you know.  Working together, like that.  Like- like when you aren’t from the city, right? Everything seems chaotic and weird and you can’t really get the hang of going with flows and shit, right? But there’s- there’s a system, a system everyone learns but no one sees or speaks, and it’s like...”

Jean starts moving his hands, trying to find a new curve in the idea falling from his overdrawn lips.  He is looking into the air between his hands and then at Marco for reassurance and when he finds confusion he returns to his shifting, feeling hands and the intangible shape he is trying to convey. The planes of his palms twitch concave and convex, catching unwilling sunlight and running away as if burned or frightened, fingers turning segmented and shaking and delicate in their feeling so as not to spook away their guest, trying to keep it protected from the stirring air around him and the slow ebbing sound of the gentlest time of river.  Marco chews the inside of his cheek.

“When you’re pressed all together like that, right? You slip and slide past each other. And, like, it’s- it’s like, you figure out where the spaces are, that kind of observance, and you can... You operate with the system, right? Like, there was this- every day, 12 o’clock, there would be this guy, this crazy guy, walking the fuck down the street, grabbing pigeons and shoving them in his pockets.  Bare hands, you know? And we had it- we had it so we knew the exact radius of his pigeon extravaganza, right? And so gawkers would kinda... get shoved into the radius, and the rest of us would find our person sized space, in the crowd.  And it was a lot of bobbing and weaving, so if you... if you didn’t know how to get close like that, like outsiders, then well.  Pigeon pockets for you.”

Jean laughs a little, shifting his legs again, dropping his hands into his lap now that he’s found his weird Staten Island story for the day that Marco has failed to understand, but nonetheless feels the sentiment of.  Jean shrugs, and then lets more fall into the silence.

“Look, it’s- it isn’t the same, as the leaves and water, or whatever, right? But... I don’t know, it’s like if the roots were like “the fuck is all this water” and just let it sink down, right? They didn’t know the system, whole fuckin tree dies.  I mean it’s a hell of a lot harder to see, out here, but it’s like... it’s like I’m just used to the part where I have to be a part of the system, right? Do or die.  But you have this whole fuckin... Appreciation, for it, that I never really had.  Like you see all the, I don’t know.  The spaces, where shit can fit together.  But I think it’s cool, that you can, you know.  See that kind of shit, right? I mean... I mean the whole symbiotic fuckin’...

Jean sighs, a little more heavily than the last time Marco can remember, and shrugs more intensely than Marco has seen someone shrug.  

“Will you fuckin’ say something already? I mean, man of few words, I can dig it, but- See, I will just keep going, like I will not stop, and-”

The wind changes direction slightly.  Marco smiles.

“I... Would not mind hearing more.”

Jean babbles.

* * *

 

The sunlight has become less suspicious of Jean as it has touched him more- it has felt along the high planes of his face, pressed against his thin, bowed lips, reflected across his wheatgrass eyes.  It has so gently touched and licked across his skin, it has so delicately ruffled, orange with dawn and purple with sunset, into his blonde on top hair.  The forest is still suspicious of him, without a doubt, but it seems that Marco’s growth in trust has led to a small space being created, where Jean can affix his foot or his left kneecap or whatever else.  Jean is allowed to see a little, because of this- the way the frost clings to treebark at dawn, the way the changing air blows up the leaves of trees when it is going to rain.  Marco can see him learning, growing, and it makes him smile.

Rufus presses his nose into Jean’s leg- Marco has been gone for most of the day, and Jean had been charged with gathering dry twigs for kindling.  Jean thought it was definitely a bullshit job- he did not know how much Marco worried about Jean and his lack of understanding of the forest, about whether Jean could avoid predators and burning down the cabin.  Jean knew the pillowcase pressed into his arms, and the wet nose of a dog that usually came as a part of a pair of which the other was off galavanting god knows where.  Jean did not know how Marco could stand these dogs, their need for attention, much less how he communicated to them to come in or trusted them to run off.  Jean had had a poodle, as a kid- a small dog that was mean as all hell and that his mother forbade him from playing with, from touching.  He had rarely been denied what he wanted until that point in childhood, before everything went downhill and he wanted things that were more than his favorite dinner or a new pokemon card package, and the denial of the movie images of a boy and his dog enraged him, infuriated him almost as much his his presence had infuriated that little white dog.  After his father’s stroke and their move into Staten Island, he had been glad to see it given to the pound- he had been almost smug his mother chose to keep him and not the animal he hated.  Years later, it would stand as a symbol for what he had resented and lost after the day everything fell apart.

Rufus was still nosing about Jean, though- as if he were going to find something, as if he were capable of peeling away all the mean hiding Jean’s sensitive core.  Jean knees him away, but does not get nipped at with a tiny, black lipped mouth and his eyes go just the barest trace of soft that Rufus doesn’t understand but still feels in the air.  Jean presses his hand into the top of the dog’s head, ruffling black hair before retracting his hand with a yelp when it comes into contact with a large, pink tongue- a tongue that was loving and rounded instead of high and sharp.  Jean looks back at the dog, back at happy, stick-out brown eyes and gives it the barest trace of a smile.  Rufus responds by bounding forward after Jean, as if Jean had told him to stay and he had done a trick by failing to heel for just a few seconds.  Jean lets out a quiet laugh that encourages the incorrigible hound even more, pressing his nose into the cleft of Jean’s ass in a way that makes Jean jump a foot.  Rufus was always a lover of roughhousing, and he pounces- Jean feels that cold nose through his clothes and in his core in a way that warms him in a way he has never been warmed by something as messy and ugly as a dog.  Messy tree roots press into his back and pull at his shoulderblades and knead into the stressed out sections of his back as he digs his fingers into the sides of Rufus’s face like he’s a little kid who finally got a golden retriever.  Rufus pants into his face, drawing hot dog slobber up his cheeks with his sandpapery tongue and Jean lets him just as Jean lets himself.

* * *

 

The sunlight drifting through the remaining autumn leaves is a warmer breed- a duskier breed.  Marco estimates it will not be long before he has to call it a day.  He pulls open a dusty wooden door, one that bears a grain not from Marco’s forest but red impressed in fibers that are.  He has, there, the rifles he doesn’t keep above his fireplace, the safety rifles- Marco’s usual long, heavy, deep brown at the butt and black at the lip.  The one he gives Jean is smaller- the first gun Marco ever shot, the one he thinks can best cradle the fingers of someone who has never had to catch their food with bullets instead of coupons, someone who doesn’t handle the twists of leaves and winds and fate with a degree of normalcy found in a fearful relationship with time.  Jean’s hands are slow to take it- fingers soft around the bottom as Marco presses it into his chest, trying to instill confidence with his smile.  Jean smiles back- nervous, anxious, but willing to try- and Marco clears his throat.

“Have you ever held a gun before?”

“No, definitely no.”

Jean laughs nervously, Marco claps him on the arm.  Marco raises his gun in demonstration for Jean, who weakly attempts to copy him and who fails, the bottom too low on his chest and his cheek straying from the barrel like he is afraid its touch will burn him.  Marco sucks his teeth.

“Are you... sure you can do this?”

Jean nods rather frantically, making affirmative noises in the back of his throat, where Marco also frequently hides his voice behind his phlegmy anxiousness, as he avoids Marco’s gaze.  Marco breathes out and turns more toward Jean, who whirls toward him with the gun, nerves plain on his face.  The air stills and the leaves stir in the vacuum as Marco pushes the barrel from himself, laughing the same nervous way Jean did only shortly before and setting his own gun down carefully.  Marco is glad he has an activity- he is glad he has something to lend himself to that he is good at, and he maybe, just barely, is glad that for the first time thus far he is not the one nervous and terrified. His face is bright with enjoyment of Jean’s inexperience, his eyes smiling to Jean as he revels in his ability to choose to be teaching instead of cruel.  It has been a long, unbearably long time since he has gotten close enough to someone with such a gap in skill, and all too often he has been the one left behind the abysmal leap between amateurship and mastery.  It is not, then, that he is laughing at Jean- not that he takes joy in knowing more than someone else, or has a petty need to see someone fail to do what he is skilled with.  It is that he has the ability to impart something useful upon someone else- a sharing that he can remember from earlier, somehow both less and more heavily burdened days in his life, days where he explained and organized binders and taught drills and kicked leather in the in between of a dead boy’s smiles and a dead man’s laugh.  Days where Marco longed for success instead of peace- days before the forest and before his exile and before the line connecting his mouth to his mind was snipped with a too hopeful, overly ambitious letter opener.

“Look, it is just-  Move your hand...”

Marco starts repositioning Jean’s hold, ignoring the way Jean seems to go frigid every time Marco’s skin comes into contact with his own but for a small, slightly and unintentionally crooked smile that makes Jean look away in embarrassment.  Marco can tell Jean is a sensitive man- he is someone constantly aware of himself, of the ways his voice rests and of the exact careful positioning of his knees under tables people wouldn’t peek under just in case- Marco had, long ago, been similar, though his anxiety bred over-warmth and Jean’s grew cruel, heat edged ice.  Marco makes a few other directions before readjusting the butt carefully, standing behind Jean.  He can feel the all too familiar tightening shoulderblades from the shift in Jean’s too large green coat, he can feel the air shifting around Jean’s barely there, embarrassed intake of breath.  He instructs Jean on how to shoot, how to turn off the safety.  Jean shoots at and misses a few abandoned bird nests, eyes bright for approval and quick to spiteful embarrassment in a shade Marco hadn’t seen before, and Marco decides it is time for them to head out- he has found the threshold between adequately teaching Jean how to use a rifle and leaving enough time to actually get anything done.  They spent altogether too long talking over slightly burned stew for lunch, and he wants to stock up before the inevitably arriving freeze.

Branches cracking and breaking under unsure feet, a rifle held at just barely the wrong angle in a soft armpit, breath heavy with nerves and air filling with easily pinpointed fright- Jean is not a good hunter.  But he has good ears, on him- he hears birds settling in trees and moves too quickly to hold his breath, settles into a shooting position without being aware of his heels and sends pheasants off flying, scares a stag into northward migration.  His eyes spot movement in the foreground of their field more quickly than Marco’s had five or six years prior, and Marco knows that there is a connection between Jean’s keen aura and Jean’s keen energy.  Marco stops him quick- he thinks he hears a wild boar, sound and sense spread over Marco the way Marco’s hand is spread over Jean’s nervous and heaving chest.  Marco thinks Jean is a fan of boar- he had enjoyed it thoroughly for breakfast in the past couple of mornings- but he knows that a brown furred, frightening face that will charge instead of flee is not something he wants to spook.  He holds a finger to his lips before drawing up his gun, barrel firm in his hooked prosthetic and hand on the trigger, pressing the butt to his shoulder, cheek against the cold, barely tarnished rest just before the place where he would attach a scope.  He breathes in smooth, out smoother.  He concentrates his eyes on the marauding shape of his next few meals.  He drops his gun slightly, consigning to move closer.

Marco stalks forward, stepping in obvious spots that Jean can place his feet in carefully.  Jean, at this point in the day, has his wits about him- he follows suit.  He does his best to keep his excited voice low until Marco gives him a second lip to finger signal for silence- and then all Marco hears is the buzzing of adrenaline in Jean’s bated breath and the careless mucking around of an out of season old boar.   Marco catches the ruddy tones of earthy brown in the coat he suspects will sell well at market or, better yet, give Stella’s arthritic bones a more permanent padding so that in her final years she need not go the few months before Marco replenishes her pile.  She was not satisfied with his trip to market- she was not too regal for bacon treats, as no dog is, but she gave Marco a look that told him he needed to buckle down if she were to be able to follow him around anymore.

The tip of the boar’s snout, from this far away, is tinged with silver.  It has long white hairs sticking out down the sides of its fatty belly, its cheeks stuffed with mushrooms as it roots around violently for more.  Marco was never a fan of mushrooms, and was too anxious about accidentally poisoning himself to attempt consuming the ones out in the forest.  Boars, though, were reckless- over sure of themselves, with their sensitive noses.  Marco always thought them careless in their feedings, assumed they were eating dirt half of the time and half expected each downed log to be a boar that poisoned itself in its haste for food.  Marco admired that, in them- what he would give to be able to be careless, to take risks and to be able to throw himself into something without being too terrified to breathe.  Jean does not seem to view the animal the same way- Marco is surprised the boar, as old as it is, has not sensed his shivering fear, his chattering teeth and vibrating fingers watching it intently.  It isn’t that Marco is not appreciative of Jean’s strength of will, it isn’t that his weakness of constitution isn’t understandable.  It’s just that Marco knows that Jean is torn between seeing a terrifying animal and something with cute round eyes from a Disney movie.  Marco has, through his years in the forest, learned that most animals are neither, and that old animals, animals waiting for death and animals who do not know what it is but sense its magnitude, are blank and dead in the eyes.  They are animals that nature took pity upon- perhaps for her admiration for their coats or their extraordinary ugliness or both, and they have lived past the point where the light within them went out.  They grow dull- their fur neglects shine, their eyes appear almost blind.  Marco once shot an albino stag while he was trying to pin a pheasant- he remembers crying as he approached at killing something so beautiful, he remembers crying more as it looked up at him with blank pink eyes that did not understand why he was upset and lacked desperation, eyes with a resignation for death that Marco had come to fear more than anything whenever he saw it.  He buried the stag, and regretted it for fifty one days, days that passed segmented and with a new understanding between Marco and the light flowing beneath the ground.

Marco knows that this animal is just the same- nature has allowed it to live past its prime, has rendered it almost deaf and surely blind with age.  It does not have the light in its head that Marco can see in trees and plants and, yes, occasionally other boar- it is these husks of beings Marco hunts the hardest, because he has come to an understanding with himself that these animals are not meant for the here and now, that they are sucking up the resources of light.  He has given himself an enemy, something he must eradicate- and in doing so, he has given something back to the forest, in his mind, that can be leveraged against what it gives to him.  Marco looks back at Jean- who, under Marco’s careful, nurturing gaze stiffens and smiles reassuringly.  Marco jerks his chin towards the boar, nodding.  Jean cocks his head before shaking it with sudden understanding.  Marco jerks his chin more firmly, nodding with a sureness he hopes but knows isn’t assuring, and Jean lifts his gun with shaking, fearful hands, with his tongue on his lips and his shoulder positioned incorrectly on the butt.  He pulls the trigger- yelps as he does it, a small noise that is more regretful than a scream but just as desperate, the boar goes down the same time Jean does, recoil throwing him as badly as the bullet threw the boar.  Marco shoots it a second time, for good measure, before he smiles at Jean, claps him on the shoulder and presses his hand warm against the tensed knot of his anxious lower back, makes him help with the retrieval process despite the shaking excitement and disgust in his hands.

Jean has never seen an animal die before- it was much more tragic, more unexpected and less understandable, than the people he had seen die.  It is not that he wanted them dead, or that he is inhuman or some kind of murderous fiend- it is that every time he has seen a person go out, he has seen someone who understands go out.  He has been given justification, he has been told why this has happened and he has been given moral crumpets to dip in crime ridden tea, and he has never seen something that was never told about death meet its end.  It was terrifying- Marco allows Jean to tell him he was startled by the noise.  Marco allows Jean to think he took light from this animal’s eyes and does not tell him he caught something already restlessly running through the dark.  Marco presses his hand soft into the back of Jean’s head as Jean cries into his shoulder like he is a child and not a man, and in this Marco knows Jean is still a child, inside, stunted from something dark and sad and something Marco wishes he could reprieve but something Marco knows the forest will soothe with time.  Marco knows Jean will be less frightened when Jean fully fleshes out the him shaped hole in Marco’s life, in the forest’s life.  

After all, Jean is not the kind of person to become a vegetarian.

* * *

 

The harsh click-ring is something Jean had never heard, and something he certainly had not expected.  Marco could see the incredulity plain on Jean’s face, the lack of understanding curving his brows upward and the suspension of belief pulling at the corners of his mouth, as he pulled the small blue and used-to-be-white plastic case up and out from the pressed space between his (their) bed and Marco’s armoire.  Jean, still, had failed to move his things out of his duffel bag, even though Marco had cleared him the bottom two drawers.  Marco had settled it, heavy, on his thighs, sitting back in the armchair Jean had vacated minutes before to run out, armed with a flashlight, to the outhouse, and which he had therefore acquiesced.  Jean had sat, clearly miffed about the loss of his favorite seat, in the rocking chair Marco seemed to love, and Jean was now watching with question in his unanswered eyes as Marco continued typing his report.

“A typewriter.”

Marco does not pause, hand flying over the too heavy keys at a speed matching a moderately decent typist (perhaps who has the flu and is not wearing their reading glasses) with two limbs where he had one.

“Yes.”

“You are using a typewriter.”

“I am.”

Marco uses his hooked prosthesis to push up his glasses, purchased at the Walgreens and with a too wide bridge that always found a way to slip down his gently sloping nose.  Jean looks at Marco as if he is doing the equivalent of boxing a kangaroo in an airport while blindfolded and wearing ray-bans.  Marco lets his shoulders stay still as he concentrates- having something to do often quells his anxiousness, and as of late, being around Jean has had the same effect.  He breathes out.  The fire pops and it, for the first time since Jean got here, does not steal away Marco’s guest’s attention.  Something warm swirls within the cabin, like a mixture of lavendar and sandalwood and a pinch of vanilla, and Marco welcomes it.

“But you’re... Why?”

Marco’s eyebrows twitch as he jerks his chin toward a row of binders on his overfull bookshelf.  He trusts Jean to understand what he is conveying, but Jean fails spectacularly.  Marco’s lips twitch at the corners.  It is almost as if Jean is trying to be funny, as if his lack of understanding is a joke.  The rocking chair creaks against the floor in a way that makes Marco’s face warm.

“You’re an author? I mean, man, I’ve heard of them being reclusive, but-”

Marco snorts- it something that jars him for a second, his fingers pause above his keyboard as he realizes and commends himself for the natural feeling the action had.  He feels light curling around his comfort node.

“I am... I work for, for the National Parks Service.  I write... for them.”

Jean nods, settling down.  He huffs a little, his head sinking down to his chest and his eyes straying away and Marco can only tell because he can no longer feel the weight of the fields his father’s cows grazed on pressing into where his neck meets his back.

“Figures.  Can’t believe I thought you were even an author.  I mean, what would you write about? Banging forest nymphs?”

“I... already do that.  For the National Parks Service.”

There is a pause.  Jean waits for him.

“They... are really big on, um.  Wood nymphs, recent, recently.  They are... endangered.”

Jean is quiet a little more, as if expecting Marco to continue.  Marco pauses his typing to listen for when the waiting crosses over into “not speaking because you aren’t funny” territory, but then Jean lets a sound out of his nose almost like a whinny and snickers.

“Oh my god, Marco, wouldn’t that be hella illegal then? Like I’m pretty sure if I fuck a Siberian Tiger I’ll go to prison.”

“I am pretty sure if you f-fuck a Si- a Siber, a _tiger_ , you will not live long enough. To go to prison.”

Jean makes another one of his extended snort nose whinnies and curls in on himself further, laughing at the prospect of being mauled for putting his weenie near a literal tiger.  Marco finds his own shoulders shaking, if silent, before Jean follows up.

“So I can’t fuck a tiger but you get to write nymph smut for government pay? That shit is unfair”

Marco’s laugh starts to have volume, Jean’s words breath life into it and like fire and love it licks along the faces of everyone in the cabin.  It is warm, rich, full, not anything like the small, whispering out and too high noise that Marco enjoys hearing from Jean’s mouth.  There are no squeaks in the lilt of it, and now that Jean has heard it once he resolves to hear it every chance he can, for as long as he can.  Marco is beautiful.

* * *

 

Jean snores, when he sleeps.  It is like punching a bucket of play-doh but with an AK 47, it is like trying to ram a 20 lb slug into a pill bottle a tenth its size, it is like a broken radio’s song flowing out of a sleeping face and into Marco’s air.  The night time never gave Marco the anonymity it gives others- he feels just as watched, as accompanied, as during the day- he would never understand why nighttime meant darkness to other people when to Marco it meant more clearly seeing the light shining out of the magma hot center of the earth.  But he is not the one, feigning anonymity- he is the one who is silent, and he is not the one who is snoring because right now, at this precise space between the ticking of a clock Marco has not seen but can be trusted to exist, no one is snoring.  The noise filtering down towards Marco is something similar to a snore in shamefulness, but much smaller in terms of sound- it has shaking bits, the way a snore does, but it is not strong at the front and tapered of like the shape of a snore.  Marco recognizes small sobs drifting down from above him.

Marco is unsure what to do about Jean crying.  He feels the inexplicable need to comfort him- to touch the place where his hair meets the thick skin of his neck and tell him he’s alright the same way he did when Jean shot the boar.  But Marco senses that this is different- he can hear catches of phrases the night rips out from Jean’s miserable lips about something being his fault and about being lonely and about being wrong and dirty and not good enough and Marco’s heart aches because he feels the same, he always feels the same, because he knows he has something real to be guilty for.  Jean cried when he shot an already mostly dead pig- he is not someone who deserves to be guilty.  He is not strong, Marco reasons, but he is sensitive- he is good, at his core, Marco can tell, and it tugs at the shattered corners of his heart to hear Jean in pain, to hear Jean letting out what he keeps hidden not knowing that Marco is betraying him and listening.  

Jean chokes on his own breath- Marco can hear hoarse, whispered groans and the sound not unlike the wail Jean likely made when he was ripped from the comfort of his womb, when he, as a baby with blue to turn wheatgrass colored eyes, saw the dirty, disgusting place where he would have to live and wished more than anything to return to the soft, loving embrace of his mother’s body, but now quieter- now ashamed for the need for comfort.  Marco licks his lips and tries to find the delicate threshold between letting Jean save face and pressing happiness into his new-found friend’s shoulders.  The dogs, overly concerned but without understanding, gather like worried buoys at the edge of Marco’s mattress, Rufus pressing his cold nose especially hard into Marco’s knee, begging him to do something to make Jean happy and begging him to stop the pain sounding through the cabin.  Marco looks to Stella, on the couch and disgusted with Jean and his weakness, and pleads with her for a course of action.  Plain on her face is the command for lack of action- and he knows, Marco knows, that she is right- Jean is a prideful man on the outside, and a delicate, ashamed one within.  He does not know what it would take to puncture Jean’s exterior or if it would make him deflate like a balloon.  Marco cares about Jean- he does not want him to turn into a husk.

But Jean’s violently heaving chest shakes the springs of the mattress above Marco and Marco cannot ignore Jean, he knows he can’t ignore him.  He feels it twisting, in his gut, this friendship like hookworms prying apart his insides as winter approaches and spring becomes a far off dream.  Marco shifts in his bed, he hears Jean’s breath catch at the sound of his old, rusty bedsprings and he clears his throat.

“Jean?”

Jean moves violently above Marco- he can see the mattress dipping as he forces himself to settle and his heart aches.  There is silence for a few seconds and then a sniffle and Marco wets his lips again before he moves inquisitive words up towards Jean like comforting hands.

“Jean, are you okay?”

The air is still-  Stella is proud of Marco’s ability to communicate but carries disdain for the reason.  Marco decides against placating her for the desperation in his heart and the worried press of a cold nose into his bed-warmed skin.

“Jean-”

“‘m fine.  Fine.  Go back to sleep.  Please.”

Jean’s voice wavers, cracks, like it is new to this world and like it is unsure of itself and does not know how to walk on its own feet into the night, as if it can cling to Jean’s shivery teeth and hide from the world.

“Jean, you are- you, you are crying.”

There is another silence, a longer one, a heavier one, one that feels like fire raining from the heavens and ice licking up the insides of Marco’s jawbone and too large teeth clenching down on the space where his neck meets his shoulder, pressing into his back like he can’t breath.  Jean sighs.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Marco breathes out and he would let it go if it weren’t for the crack in Jean’s voice and the desperate need for affection he could almost taste in the stale air drifting around him.

“Jean-”

“Fuck off, okay? Fuck off.  Leave it alone.”

“Jean-”

Jean huffs, and there’s a loud shifting and he starts jamming his feet around the ladder, chest vibrating and breath still heavy with tears.  Marco sees his feet before he realizes Jean is trying to storm away, storm into a nighttime forest.  Marco sits up in his bed, pushing off his blankets and moving towards Jean.

“I do not... Jean, you are-”

“Just- just shut up, okay? Fuck, christ, you’re fucking- stop.”

Jean makes it to the bottom of his ladder at last, shoulders pressed up to his ears and Marco doesn’t know what to do to make them go back down, he feels like its his fault, he knows it is his fault, he needs to help.  He has to find a way, Jean needs him to he can see the desperation for Marco to save him in the way his eyes reflect the moonlight and he just.

Marco scrambles out of bed, catching Jean by the arm and halting him in his bolt for the door.  Jean isn’t wearing shoes, and the ground is so cold it makes his skin pop out goose pimples like there should be snow.  Everything is tinted with the same shade of anxious blue and Marco presses his lips together before he says anything.

“Jean.”

Jean’s eyes are red rimmed, angry, hateful, and needy.  Jean screws up his mouth but stops pulling forward, scrunching up further into himself and pulling his arm away from Marco, and Marco lets him because he was terrified of touching him in the first place.  Jean watches Marco watching him, in the cold air of night, and then, as if a threshold has broken he shakes, shakes like a newly grown leaf in a hurricane, and he presses his face into itself and he opens his mouth and the sound that comes out is like a little animal noise, like a wracking child’s sob that could never come from a grown man but somehow still has.  Jean looks away from Marco, rears his fist back and punches his shoulder, hard, before he closes the gap and lets Marco hold him.  And hold him Marco does- he spreads his thumbs soothingly against Jean’s back, between his spread wide shoulder blades and the vibrating lungs overworking themselves beneath, he presses his cheek into the top of Jean’s head, he is just barely tall enough to have the leverage to do so and so he takes the advantage and tries to melt Jean’s sadness out of him with his shining sun of platonic love.  Jean presses his fingers like a greedy child’s into Marco’s sleep shirt, balling the fabric and accepting the comfort like he is accepting death.

“Jean, I- you are important, to me.  You matter, to me, a lot.  I need you.”

Jean shivers, more, but seems to be receptive to the soft, comforting warmth in Marco’s voice, susceptible to the kindness Marco is pushing as hard as he can.  Jean drags in breath like he is drowning in his own salty tears and Marco feels more pangs than he had before.  Jean digs his face into Marco so far that his voice is muffled when it comes out, stuttery and shaking like it is dizzy from being put in a jar and shaken by a too cruel child.  Marco cannot hear the muffled words and so he tries to pull Jean back from him gently, and Jean clings like he wants to be superglued to Marco’s skin.

Marco decides, then, against making him explain, and he isn’t sure whether it is because he doesn’t know the words or because he doesn’t know how to say them.  He wants Jean to be happy, he is happier because of Jean, Jean is important to Marco, and that’s all he tells him, again and again.  Jean cries.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is no where near the caliber of the last but I expect it to pick back up in the next one because of the plot goals. This is kind of a bridge with lots of cute jeanmarco-ey moments as they get to know eachother and become friends, so if you're about that here you are I guess. Warning though shit will get semireal again next chapter.


	3. Midnight's Children

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Introduction of plot- Erwin Smith is doing illegal things, things are all connected, Marco has a panic attack, and metaphors run the fuck away from me.

When Marco wakes up in the morning, he can always feel the cold, oppressive, pressing into the skin of his face.  Rivulets of chilliness run down his cheeks like too long fake fingernails, red painted ones that are chipped at the edges from typing and checking cans and cartons of eggs that are piled on top of the cans in paper bags, just barely scratch him like nightmares and terror and the smell of generic brand hand sanitizer.  Recently, though, the fingernails of his dreams have been lighter, paler, less opaque- he thinks it is perhaps because Jean is breathing above him and the hot air from his sleep drawn lungs is making the icicles in his liver melt.  He imagines his mouth turning up at the edges- he imagines his speckled cheeks lifting and catching the early dawn’s sunlight on their curves and everything being okay.  But his mouth stays unmoved, his lips pressed together like he’s a fish with no teeth, and he plays his fingers nervously at the knit together blanket that protects his feet from cold, wet canine noses and fears of something living under his bed that everyone has and no one admits to.  He cannot decide if he is afraid of being okay or if he is afraid he doesn’t deserve to be okay or if he knows he doesn’t deserve to consider if he deserves to be okay, but he knows that, right now and probably forever, he is not okay.  He knows Jean isn’t, either, but he isn’t sure Jean recognizes the way his shoulders sit too close together when he stutters on words or sees the way his eyes vibrate when he hears something a mile off and he is, at least a little, terrified of Jean finally noticing it one day and thinking he is weak and hating him or resenting him or, worst of all, pitying him.  

Marco turns his head, ever so slightly.  Stella’s glowing eyes, for the first time in a long time, do not meet his through the dark- firelight and not sunlight presses into his skin and he realizes that the warmth he was feeling fresh out of sleep was not from the comfort of the presence of a friend, but comfort from the still burning fire.  He realizes it is still night, that he should still be asleep and afraid instead of awake and terrified.  Panic and guilt rumble like pebbles in his sternum, like pins and needles and rocks in the trunk of a car that is running off of the road.  He doesn’t know what time it is or how late it is, but he feels his ribcage tingling because it is the time of night where bad things happen and where witches climb out of the eves of migraines and great gelatinous fears slip from his brain and into existence.  

It is dark, it is night, the sky weighs on his shoulders in spite of and because of his roof.   He saw another albino stag, when he and Jean had been hunting, earlier.  He isn’t sure what it means, but it reminded him terribly of the first one he killed and he called in the dogs early for fear of familial revenge and blameful but unknowing eyes.  There was no real way to know if the albino had anything to do with the other, but Marco feels connected to them both by his having seen them and he gives them relation nonetheless.  Everything he sees, he knows, is made one through him- is woven, helplessly and shamelessly, into his reality.  Through him, all things are connected- what he knows and what he knows he doesn’t know, what he has seen and what he has never seen but for the pictures.  This is what a blonde on top boy has to do with a black haired one that used to be much happier.  It is what Stella has to do with the old man, in town, who is allergic to cats and forced his children into loving a Doberman to save his pride as a man.  It connects each star in the sky with the freckles on his nose, presses together postcards of Mount Fuji and his mothers disappointed and disappointing eyes.  Marco, for only Marco and no other, is the center of the universe- the vacuum of space presses his existence into himself and Jean’s existence upon Jean and the existence of that albino stag into that albino stag.  Marco does not know the connections of the albino stag to the dead one but he knows, now, that the albino stag relates through him to the dead one and that they both have something to do in symbolism with Jean and with the boy who he killed and he thinks the forest is, perhaps, trying to tell him something- but he cannot decipher it.  He wishes desperately he hadn’t seen that stag- he wishes he hadn’t seen that damned albino stag, but it has been too long and too long in regret for him to wish he hadn’t killed the first one.  Its death, its lack of being, is something he saw- it has become a part of the world centered on him that he lives in and he cannot separate it and eject it the way he wants.

Jean flutters a little in his sleep and Marco knows rationally it is not because of how hard he is thinking but in the same part of himself where he feels the connection between the two albino stags he feels a connection between his hurricaning head and Jean’s restlessness in sleep.  It’s ridiculous- absolutely ridiculous, pretentious in a way that rubs a simple man like himself the wrong way, anxious and shifty in ways Marco was ashamed of himself for feeling when he was a teenager and now just accepts with a kind of resignation that scares him.  He never liked philosophy and he never liked to have to put into language the nature of his relationship when he is connected to all things, and thinking about it made him question it and question himself and know that he himself cannot even quantify it without changing the shade and tone and gradient of the buzzing and unsure texture.  His eyes close and he doesn’t remember closing them and he breathes deep and imagines deep blue like too far under the ocean to breathe and too far into the sky to breathe and he pretends it balances the pressure he feels on his eyeballs but instead they ache with want for sleep.  They force themselves upward- he knows that the iris bulges out because of the lump of his corneas and he knows logically that that lump doesn’t scrape the roof of his eye sockets but he feels it nonetheless.  He hates being so tired he aches- he used to do it when he was young, so much so that his eyes became glued to sound padded ceilings and when he laid down it hurt so much he would cry.  He tries not to connect the feeling to Jean and to the stag the way he has already connected it to David and the dead stag but like all things he thinks, the universe in his heart ties them together with red and thin thread he cannot break and cannot, for the life of him, ignore.  He presses his hand tight into a fist and he does not remember falling asleep, but he remembers, soon after, waking up guilty instead of terrified.

* * *

 

Marco sinks, smooth, into too hot water- steam bumbles into the chilled but less than icy air the same as his slightly startled breath.  His toes are warming into a lobster-y red and he can feel the water swishing between them the same as he can feel the growing of the trees in each intake of his breath.  There are not a great many more leaves left, in the coming of winter, but he can hear the hangers on struggling against the invading colder weather the way Marco can feel the cold trying to cool his almost boiling bathwater.  He expects it will not be long until the first snow.  He had once, in the beginning, had great issue with bathing outdoors- he does not know why the thrumming anxiousness of those first few months did not pour back into his shoulder blades when Jean asked him how he showers, but he appreciates the relief of not having it have been an ordeal.  He is not very much a fan of ordeals- he is someone who, in his life, wants peace, happiness, and comfortableness.  He has stopped hoping for success and for fulfillment and for worldly gains, because he knows and has known since the day he ruined his own life that he will not be able to find them, not with a jumbled up mouth and one hand for searching.  But the forest and his outdoor bath offer him something his other life never had- a stopping place.  The forest offered isolation, but it also offered solitude- suffocation, but sanctuary.  The lack of expectation and of judgement meant he could be neither great nor a failure, which is something that someone who has given up on being great appreciates.

He can hear Jean making a real effort across the property- Jean did not like chopping as much as Marco does, but he doesn’t hate it as much as he hates fishing.  Jean, Marco has come to understand, is someone who needs movement- if he doesn’t have something to do with his hands, if he doesn’t have something to tangle his concentration in, he gets nervous, anxious, apprehensive.  He finds thanks to be more like adulation and he looks at everything just slightly too hard, he scares away the delicate and blames himself for more than what he has done.  Marco has similar eyes, similar watchfulness- but he has found, as of late, that his over observance has been appreciative of Jean.  He is quieter, he is more cautious, and he is quick to right wrongs he knows Marco won’t tell him about.   Marco leans his head against the top of the tub, cradling the place where his spine meets his skull so that the weight leaves it.  He closes his eyes, listening to the too slow but not too labored sound of wood splitting, and he imagines what is like when he and Jean reverse roles.  He searches for the comfort of the rhythm he hopes Jean finds, but knows that someone as restless as Jean does not find.  He thinks that’s okay.

Marco does not remember becoming a fastidious man, he knows he wasn’t before and he doesn’t realize, fully, that he is not, still.  But his favorite parts have become the squiggly, awkward parts- the little ripples of cellulite like stone skipped water over the underside of a less than ashamed ass, the sharp and bony v of skinny elbows turned outwards by bending arms, the little slip of muscle above a locked knee in muscular thighs, the shivering, barely there anxiety when someone wakes up in a new place and doesn’t remember at first how they got there.  He likes sharp, overhanging noses, like the icicles on his roof in winter, too long eyelashes on just barely sunken eyes that opened so you could see the too fat waterline, lips with the little pinch of skin in the middle that ran parallel to the too deep cut of a cupid’s bow and the way they bent and parted into an entertained brand of grimace.  His heart beat for the gap between smiling, bright teeth, for the set of moles on the back of the neck, for the softened little w where hairline met nape- he saw something new, each day, and each discovery was something he learned was beautiful.  Marco does remember developing a habit for seeing, for recognizing, beauty- but he has not gotten close enough to another person since long before that time, and he does not know if he is supposed to recognize beauty in other people.  He does not think he would have liked the too high end of a snarky laugh or the dryer tips and greasy roots of bleach topped hair when he was young- but he likes them, needs them, now.  Like the forest and like his dogs and like he has attempted to do with himself, he has been seeing Jean and learning to love and accept Jean and to look at the parts of Jean he knows Jean doesn’t like to think about and he has been seeing that they are parts of someone beautiful and so they too, therefore, must be beautiful.

Marco has never met someone like Jean- a gay man, he thinks, possibly, maybe, yes, but more importantly, someone who sits in between self hatred and narcissism so carefully.  Someone who wraps himself in conceit to hide self deprecation, someone who is so focused on himself it is almost shameful but whose focus is so anxious and critical it is almost tragic.  Marco has never met someone with such unshielded eyes, with such clear eyes, he has never met someone so self-contradicting in their kindness and so greedy with their graciousness.  Marco has never been friends with someone that can analyze him and see the core of him in a single action, he is not used to being scrutinized and he is not used to scrutiny as an expression of love, but he is learning, ever so slowly, to welcome it from his guest turned friend.

Marco is not yet sure he knows Jean, not at his core.  The way the moonlight reflects off his hair when he goes for the outhouse is the way it reflects off of someone with greatness within them and someone with sadness within them- Marco is not sure Jean has either, if he is honest, but he is sure he knows that Jean is good.  In Jean’s heart, down in the dirty disgusting places Marco can feel him hiding, Marco can find lightness and goodness.  Marco can tell he is afraid, though not, yet, of what scares him so terribly, can tell he likes deer meat more than boar meat, can tell he secretly wants the bottom bunk because he always has to pee at 2 am and is terrified of falling to his death but is also terrified of asking to switch places with Marco because he knows Marco is terrified of change.  Marco can feel the outside edges of Jean, and he can guess the cardboard insides of him like he is a puzzle piece but he wants, for sure, to know- he wants Jean to open himself up and show Marco all the parts of himself he hates so that Marco can tell him that those parts are fine and that Jean is perfect and that Jean should be happy because Marco wants him to be happy.

God, Marco wants Jean to be happy- if only, maybe only, because Marco is selfish- and Jean being happy makes Marco feel happy because it means that someone can be happy around him.  Marco wonders, on days like these where he cannot find peace because it runs from him the way his dreams run from sunrise, if that is the core of it- if he loves Jean because Jean loves him, in a way.  Not in _that_ way- he knows not in that way, he has never loved anyone in _that_ way, not in his 28 years long life- not that he particularly had the chance to, all considering- but he feels this closeness, with Jean.  Jean understands, interprets, him in a way that no one else has, and Marco would be scared of that if it didn’t make him happy in a way that makes him know it is something he has been missing since he killed his best friend- since he learned he had no right to a best friend, since he ruined everything with his ambitiousness, his need to please his mother, to be _someone_ , God, _anyone_ deserving of love, of pride.

There are a great many differences between Marco and Jean, but Marco has come to enjoy those differences, over time.  Steam sticks like condensation to his too cool skin and he sinks deeper, breathing out.  Jean has a face, on him- not a face like skin and flesh, but a face like a side or a wall.  And it is decorated- it is painted like he is going everywhere as if it is a venetian masquerade.  He is delicate, like porcelain, and he is beautiful, like porcelain.  Jean is soft and small, inside, he is volatile and he is sensitive and he is just the slightest bit sweet.  He has a lot of love, a lot of feelings, a lot of himself- too much of himself- and his biggest challenge is containing it.  Marco admires that large amount of self, if only because in his own life, he has never had enough self.  He never knows what he himself wants, he never knows how to fill out the enormous shell given to him and he can’t cry when he is supposed to cry or feel what he is supposed to feel.  Jean’s selfishness is borne from little things like compassion for dying leaves and a love of the smell of snow and the feeling of sunlight, it is a nontraditional selfishness that Marco considers a virtue.  Marco’s selfishness is borne from a want for selflessness, for a need for love and respect and for who he is to end up being someone he likes.  Marco’s need for success stems from a need to impress and a need to find something, anything, to hold onto, because he is terrified.  Jean already has something to hold onto, and it is too big for his light hands and he is terrified of it failing.  Marco has picked him apart, and admires him fiercely.

Marco presses the top of his gallon of soap and then massages it, one handed, into his hair.  He thinks the ends are growing longer than he would like, and he decides that he will be buzzing the back this evening.  Lavender tinged the air, the fire and ice smelling air, and Marco feels a quiet waft over himself that he has not felt in a long time.  He spreads suds over his dipping face, against his neck and carefully into the seam between the two sides of his body.  “Cult Soap”, Jean had called it, the bottle comes light purple in a large size and is plastered with biblical verses.  Marco assured him that it was cheap and that it cleaned tools as well as bodies, and Jean had just become flustered and insisted that Marco share his lotion so that his skin doesn’t slough off when it gets cold.  Marco had thanked him and neglected its use.  Marco presses a razor against his chin, drawing it up slick against the soap with closed eyes.  He likes to keep his face cleanshaven, if only because the left side grows in and the right doesn’t at all, and he looks like a loon when he doesn’t take care of it.  He presses his hand along his shoulder and the end of his stump, spreads soap against the water cooling against his goose fleshed skin down to where it meets the cooling water that covers his red and almost numb skin.  He rubs along his stomach and his back, soothingly along his thighs and between his toes, humming a song he can’t remember the lyrics to and hasn’t heard in years.  The wood chopping has stopped when he brings his head out of the water, and he doesn’t mind.  He smells like lavender.

* * *

When Jean was a child, he hadn’t ever had a favorite anything- he would suck any pacifier his mother gave to him, he would eat whatever she cooked, drink what she poured, wear what she bought, sleep with whatever blanket she would tuck him into.  He didn’t have a best friend, like other children, and he didn’t do better or worse in any particular class.  He was too lazy, you see, for disappointment- he thinks, perhaps, that he had realized but not articulated that he never wanted to experience the terrors of hope and of disappointment.  When you want something, you see, there is always a chance you won’t get it- there is a large range of unknown, a rather terrifying chance you shall be given something that isn’t what you want and then you have to be sad.  That hope is taken from you, and that little spring of premature joy is transformed into something equal and opposite- something young and bright becomes dead and dark.  He was terrified- what if the person he liked best didn’t like him as much? What if he wanted apple juice and he got water? What if he thought he needed a thicker blanket, and was left with cold toes at the end of the night? He resolved, then, to be delighted with everything, to be happy with it- he vowed never to experience disappointment, to have to have his natural distrust strengthened, to make his mother anything but delighted.  The problem, though, had been boiled eggs.  Boiled eggs had ruined his life.

When he was seven years old, he realized he didn’t like them- that he hated them.  The yolk, powdery and gooey at the same time, made his stomach curl into his nose and gave him an ache in the middle insides of his fat young thighs.  He wasn’t able to eat them- he had forced himself, smiled, told her they were delicious- she made them twice a week, before she started working, and and he put them into his small and greedy mouth and he hated them so much he could feel the dread in his optic nerve building so much he could almost think of the word optic nerve.  He remembers pressing the whites in and slicing them with his teeth like human eyeballs, and God, how he hated it- it became a takeover of his day.  He would sit, stew, in wait for those eggs- he would have dreams about bleeding egg yolk eyes and he would get an upset stomach worrying about his mother knowing how he felt.  He  thinks its stupid, now, since he is a man with many preferences who hates many things, but he came to blame his mother for his hatred of eggs- he came to think that she was doing it to spite him for never picking something he liked- that she was playing a game on him because she knows that boiled eggs taste like sulfur and a shoe pressed against cow shit and she wanted to see how miserable she could make him before he cried.  His mother, then, became a villain in his eyes- he saw everything she gave to him as something she knew he would hate, he came to resent the blanket she put over him and saw unbearable flaws in the stories she read to him and was made sick by every mediocre meal she cooked for him.

Because of that egg, he became miserable- he grew to hate everything he resolved to love because he had never decided he liked anything more than everyone else.  Rather than be constantly pleased, he was constantly disappointed- he found himself with nothing to cling to when his overly critical eyes went into the world and into himself.  There are no comfort foods for someone who enjoys nothing, there are no stuffed animals for a child who loves no one to hold, there is no just right soft blanket for a child who has never chosen softness.  And Jean came to hate the world, hate it desperately and like he wanted revenge, for doing this to him- for condemning him to misery and boredom because he tried to cheat it.

After his father’s stroke, Jean’s mother made boiled eggs every morning.  When they lived in Staten Island, she bought him cheap cereal and made him boiled eggs on Friday nights to eat Saturday mornings.  His father so loved boiled eggs- and Jean hated himself for hating something someone like his father could love.  He ate them, all growing up, even though the dread and hate boiled low in his belly like chilli and like tar.  He could hardly stand it, and he would spend days thinking about his problem with eggs and he would worry about it too much to study and too much to think, he would stand and think about it when the tall blonde man and his taller brunette friend would talk and he couldn’t help but remember it when he sat up on the stand and they looked at him like he were their very own set of boiled eggs.

* * *

 

When Reiner Braun came into being, it is probable that he was intended to  be a hurricane or a typhoon, a summer storm that downs too many trees and bears a bittersweet rainbow that doesn't get polluted by the light of cell phones and window boxes and street lights. He is self-contradicting at his core, but simple at his core in the same light. He is someone who longs, rather desperately, for somewhere to belong and for someone who is proud of him.  He is a praying mantis avoiding blasphemy by hunting with one arm who starves to death, he is a seed that has taken root in a cement crack even though there is a perfectly good plot of soil next to him, he is a fireman who works part time as an insurance representative. And so it isn't that he isn't smart or that he's a brute or that he wants to hurt anyone. He is just so heavily, dearly infatuated with the idea of a family, a group, a place where he fits, snug, into the puzzle shaped world.

Reiner has stood guard at the head of town hall for the three and a half years since he skipped bail. He has a flashlight and citizen's arrests and a dashing navy blue shirt with something like a sheriff patch that makes him feel like a policeman and that makes people think that his off-day dirty tank top is more endearing than menacing. Annie has been posing as his sister- Bertholdt has been faking being her husband, and they may consider making a baby to be more convincing, less suspicious. Reiner would love a baby- he would love the casseroles and pies that surely follow such an event, he would love someone small to teach about himself, he would love to have his family become much more like a family.  The added bonus of an extra drug mule, also, does not fall under his radar. Small towns like these were still recovering from the meth epidemic that had wrecked a good part of America in terms of homelessness and economic stability. They were tired, they were dying, they were numb. They wouldn't check pillars of the community for hidden illegal substances and they certainly  wouldn't search a young couple's newborn.  

Reiner has carved himself a life- once a year, he has a nice chat with the brave young man who almost died in Iraq (Didn’t he? Reiner thinks Bertholdt mentioned something along those lines) and on Thursday evenings he drinks the weight of a small, pureed child (more like a toddler, a baby on some days, he hadn’t pureed a great lot of babies at Staten Island but he had a lot of experience pureeing small animals and making out like they are babies and he knows the mass to volume ratio) in locally brewed and likely illegal beer with the pediatrician’s nurse, Connie, who he was getting a little soft on and who all the children who visited each March and September who needed herding around the Mayor’s office adored.  He had Dr. Arlert each April and a half, and he had pay day luncheons at Mikasa’s diner and he licked barely bitter and liquor like local honey from the lips of water warmed mugs at breakfast and slept rigidly and alone on the couch for appearances even though he knew Bertholdt and Annie wanted his warmth, and he just had his first cavity filled, two weeks ago, you know? He had never been able to afford a dentist, growing up, and he apparently has very, surprisingly soft teeth and just barely too many cavities to save most of his mouth.  The ache in his upper right jaw had lessened, and he was so happy about it he could die.  He brought beer in through that tooth like he wasn’t afraid of it getting under the little metal cap and reveled in the way it didn’t feel like a too cool yank.  

Reiner was stagnating, going still with the smell of far off pine trees and people who said hello to him every time they saw him and the barber shop that would buzz his head and throw in a shave because he was a public servant and he was always sure to make sure it was easy for the barber’s kid to get his birth certificate for baseball signups.  Reiner had never been happier in his life- this stillness, he had learned, was what success was like.  He was living in a home, a _house he owned_ , he had a family and a job and people who respected him.  He didn’t miss adrenaline or danger or blood because he had only done those things in the first place so that the people who made him forget those things could stand to be around long enough to help him forget.

And so when he saw Jean Kirschstein, when he spied blonde on top hair and too thin eyes like a fox and the way he was harassing that poor veteran from the forest, he had honestly tried all his might to forget it had ever happened.  Reiner was good at forgetting, good at lying and faking and convincing himself something hadn’t happened.  But this time, this time he couldn’t- he felt danger, he felt threat, he felt a trap looming and he didn’t want Annie and Bertholdt to fall into it but he didn’t want his nerves to push them into it anyway.  He presses his lips shut when Annie asks him what is wrong, he closes his eyes and laughs just barely too hard and pushes off Bertholdt’s careful hands when they try to warm his shoulders the same way he gently scolds Annie for pressing her cold ones into his hips.  He tells them he is fine- he starts smoking, again, smoking big black cigars that stink up the whole house and make him smell like tobacco and hickory and New York mafia movies- he tells them that nothing is wrong, he doesn’t sleep properly and falls off the couch so much Bertholdt lets him sleep in their bed like the selfish man he is, he promises he isn’t keeping anything from them, and he begs them to let him adopt a golden retriever that hated Annie’s cat like all hell.

* * *

 

Rufus has taken to Jean the way he takes to water.  Pratt is slow in the uptake, but he is more than happy to accommodate his brother.  All of Jean’s clothes come to smell of wet dog and he gets used, almost used, to the feeling of a wet nose jammed into the cleft of his ass every time he tries to bend down and open his bag.  He gets a bruise on his forehead from falling on his face a week before, he gets a scrape on his elbow from swinging his gun around restlessly and colliding with a tree, he dislocates his thumb tripping on a twig, he breaks his own heart digging his fingers in behind a velvety smooth canine ear.  Jean sits, lonely, on Marco’s mattress.  He is too lazy to crawl across the room for the armchair he so loves, and he is too engrossed in the story about gay space vikings to try to do more than rub his just barely too long toenails into Rufus’ too soft belly.  He feels like a little kid, kicking his feet against furry waters like he is in swimming class and too short for even the shallow end of the poor.  He listens to his bath water across the room, feels the fluid heating and bubbling up slow.  He needs to hear a rolling, a restlessness that will cleans the restlessness from his own bones.Marco stirs the water with a large wooden spoon, slow, pouring in just a little bit of epsom salt and not looking back but emanating anxiousness and calm at the same time.  Jean is content.

* * *

 

“Hey, Marco?”

Jean’s voice draws him out of a bit of a trance.  He had been typing much more fervently than he meant to be, recounting, again, the increase of albino animals as of late.  His last few days of reporting had been entirely overtaken by the anxiety of it, and he had forgotten to feel the temperature of the air in his face and the stirring of Jean’s breath in his ears and the weight of Stella’s gaze on his shoulders.  He jumps, slightly, at the disruption, and when he looks at Jean he forgets to reset his face from “terrified” to “colloquial” for a split second longer than it takes for Jean to realize how startled he is.  Jean looks concerned and then he looks like he doesn’t know what to say and then a period of three seconds after Jean said his name Jean continues what he meant to say.  

“Do you, um.  Do you think there’s any way we could go into town soon? I’m, uh.  I need some stuff.”

Marco presses the tip of his tongue to the place where his gums meet the backsides of his teeth and he can smell boiling anxiety and the chilliness of cherry colored wood in his walls.

“What... What kind of stuff?”

Jean looks away from him at the question, like he’s bashful, and then he shrugs and sucks his teeth and Marco feels like he ruined something without knowing what he’s ruined.  He shifts his toes and then Jean taps his feet a little.

“Need to, uh.”

Jean looks up at him, his mouth twitching a little at the edges.

“Need some condoms for all those wood nymph studs I’ve been banging, you know?”

Marco takes a second to smile, a second too small, but Jean is already giggling in spite of himself and Marco can’t help but feel the barest trace of the tightness in his shoulders drooping.

“At least... At least you’re being safe, right?”

“Marco, are you telling me there’s, like, 30 half Marco half wooden abominations running around, right now?”

Marco’s lips quirk slightly, and he turns away from his typewriter, resting his wrist against his thigh.  He is overly conscious of the way the denim feels against his skin and he resettles his feet to try and disperse it, but all that does is make him realize his tongue is just barely too big for his mouth and he can’t find a good spot for it anymore.

“If you- if you are going to be my mountain wife, you will have to accept a few things.”

“Things like you cheating on my poor ass with all the nymphs in the forest? I mean I figured they’d have enough wood and wouldn’t been interested in yours, but you never know.”

Marco snorts, and leans forward on his elbow and his stump.

“It seems that my mountain wife has been, um, been taking all their av- available wood, and so they need another source.”

“Ah, yes, and you’re their ever humble source of wooden glory?”

“That is, uh.  That seems to be my claim, Jean.”

Jean’s face cracks the same time his resolve does and he snickers.  But then he shifts again, and swallows and licks his lips.  Marco can’t smile when Jean is making the room cold, and then Jean looks at him again.

“I’m- I, uh.  I need some pills.  So.”

Marco draws his shoulders up and cocks his head a little.

“What- what kind of pills? You have... become sick? You should rest.”

Jean shakes his head, putting his hands up like he’s deflecting Marco’s concern physically.

“Nah, I- your forest wife, you know, has uh.  Has a condition.  Nothing to worry about, just.  Gonna be in a bad place if I run out in the next few days.”

“You- are you dying?”

Jean snorts, again and shakes his head a little harder.  He shrugs, and then draws up his knees with a smile more bashful than Marco was used to seeing, and Marco realizes he is seeing a very private, very lonely, very personal part of Jean, and he sees he is also handling it incorrectly.  He can feel his chest buzzing- he can feel himself ruining it, showing Jean that he is not to be trusted or talked to, he can almost hear Jean saying he wants to live in town when Jean says something else and draws Marco out of his ruining of self.

“Marco, it’s- I have an anxiety disorder.  No big deal.”

Marco cracks his fingers and watches the shapes of them with eyes focused on the floor so that he can judge their fuzzy nature properly.  He cracks his toes again.

“I am... I do not understand, but we can... We can go into town.  I trust... trust you, that you are.  Serious.  So...”

Jean hums and it’s sudden enough that it draws Marco out of his little articulation cycle.  He looks up at him, and before he looks away again he sees Jean smiling, softly, exposedly.  He feels like he is naked, and he feels like Jean is letting himself be naked for Marco.

“Thanks, Marco.  I, uh... I appreciate it.”

Marco doesn’t respond because he’s been dropped somewhere so far outside his comfort zone he can barely breathe.  But... in a good way.  In a way that makes his heart feel like it is yellow instead of burgundy.

“You’re a really good friend.”

* * *

 

Erwin shifts uneasily, pressing his fists to the arms of his chair as he watches a grainy white face press into a grainy grey one.  The taller face belongs to someone more bashful- someone less nervous, but more nervous than the broader man in his arms.  The small, white woman comes up behind them, all their legs obscured by the bottom of the window.  He would kill for audio- he knows that they only smother the muscular man like this when something is happening, when something is worrying him too badly for him to pretend to not want it.  Reiner Braun was supposed to be their detached and kind brother- these regular trysts, these reckless trysts in front of gauzy curtains have been increasingly common in the past two months.  They were the same way when Hoover and Braun had first infiltrated the tiny town- Braun was vibrating, anxious.  He had begged that the prosecutors let Hoover go, said he was innocent and that he hadn’t been responsible for the shootings behind the 7-11.  Braun had tried to say he himself hadn’t done it, and that if Hoover might have done it, than he wanted all the blame and for Hoover to walk.  Braun had been the reason Hoover had shot those teenagers- because Braun was their muscle, and Braun didn’t have the heart.

Leonhart, though, Erwin couldn’t integrate her into the picture.  It made sense, to him, that Hoover and Braun were fucking.  But where did they know Leonhart from? According to her record, she hadn’t even been properly convicted of manslaughter during self defense before she skipped bail.  She had been from Manhattan, and she didn’t have any reason to know who the hell the two men were.  But here they are, buying pregnancy tests and adopting pets and forging marriage licences and touching each other behind too thin curtains.

Erwin could only hope the reason was because Braun knew about Jean- Jean hadn’t been attacked, yet, which means Hoover hadn’t found out, at the very least.  Leonhart was cold, she was dangerous- Erwin wouldn’t put it past her to murder Jean cold.  But he couldn’t make sense of it- why wouldn’t Braun tell Hoover and Leonhart if they were in danger?  What was the connection between the three of them? Why this town?

The figures on his screen go down to bed and for the next ten minutes there is no more stirring on the screen.  Erwin shuts off the feed with a grunt, pushing back from his seat before he throws his weight forward.  He looks at the man who brought him the tapes.

“Ackerman, get Jaeger a job in the city office.  Get his sister to act sweet on Braun.”

Levi draws his eyes along the screen.

“You’re going to pop him like a whitehead, aren’t you?”

Erwin draws his too blue eyes along Levi, leaning back in his chair.

“You’ll see.”

* * *

 

_Marco runs his fingers along the edges of his too thin yellow envelope.  A young man with curly black hair and a greasy smile looks up at him expectantly as he pries teeth like piano keys and too far apart fence posts out of his own mouth.  Tar spills where he knows there was once blood, moving as if it is alive and swirling and twisting like hatred and shame and terror, painting blameful stripes down his naked torso, swirling around and into and out of his blank and lifeless eyes, his too round nostrils and his slightly stick out ears.  Marco can almost feel the air stirring menacingly in the trees, whispering blame on his deaf with panic ears- he does not hear screeching or metallic crunching, but the young man across from him beckons at the envelope with one hand and digs into his neck with countless others, pulling out veins like they are threads woven into the tapestry of his skin, creating snags and bloody snares as they tear out and the young man comes apart, everything everywhere at once and moving like images layered over one another and the imprint of each left behind like embossed guilt.  Marco cannot hear anything, but he knows the young man is making a horrendous gurgling noise, a bubbling noise, like too much gasoline and just ba.rely enough fire.  His ears buzz, buzz buzz buzz, with anxiety and apprehension, his skin tingles with the smell of burned rubber and hospital sheets and the sharp, red and chipping nails of someone else’s mother as he draws the letter opener growing out of his index finger along the envelope._

_He is dizzy- the air is too thick and he can’t move as quickly as his muscles urge him to, the young man’s smile scares him and he cannot breathe in air quickly enough because its thick like water.  Marco’s right side burns like embarrassment and cauterization, and from the smallest tear in the envelop pours his mother’s too wide, dissapointed smile, out before her face but that soon forms just ahead of him.  Her teeth are sharp, dripping with the venom of false forgiveness and expectation, he cannot hear but he feels the too hot breath of the woman behind him as she cackles and cries into the back of his neck, her talons ripping apart his paper thin, anxious skin. He imagines the young man asking why, he knows he is laughing and asking him why, and when Marco tries to get him to clarify Marco discovers his voice doesn’t work, either.  Marco’s mother curls around the arm holding the letter opener, attached forever to the letter opener, and squeezes.  Her body bends like she is a boa constrictor, but does not turn into the body of a boa constrictor.  Dave’s mother bites hard into the place where Marco’s neck meets his shoulder, and the smoke around Marco grows so strong he thinks he shouldn’t be able to see but the colors just grow brighter, brighter, bleed into each other and get tinged red as Dave pours his blood gleefully over them._

_Dave’s mother digs her nails under the flap of skin she bit up and Marco wants to scream but he is paralyzed in his throat and in his movement, like his mouth is full of cement.  He is suffocating, he is suffocating as Dave’s mother peels up the skin along his collarbone and Dave digs his nails in and peels off his own face, mucous-y skin lifting like it was never attached but Marco can feel the sound made like chewing cotton in the molars of his spine.  He can feel the sky, snowy television static when he looks directly at it but a blinding blue in the peripheral, weighing down on his shoulders.  His mother’s face moves and twists like it is laughing but tears pour down and singe lines across her face like acid, peeling her skin as Dave, poor, poor Dave, withers, moving still as if he isn’t in pain as an invisible fire blackens and shrinks his exposed bones.  Marco tries to apologize, but his throat is still stopped, sticky with black tar and frozen in place like it is stuffed with hard plastic.  His mother curls too tightly and his arm tears, he does not feel pain but he can see Dave laughing, laughing, laughing, his lipless face and melting eyes gleeful as Marco’s mother dissolves with the same disappointed look on her face as when Marco first woke up in the hospital, as when he wakes up, wakes upwakes upwakesup-_

* * *

 

The hubris, of what he did- could he call it in accident if he was selfish? He had just wanted to do something that allowed him to deserve the pride he had, the pride in him he wanted to see in his mother’s eyes- If someone was dead because of him, and that person was someone he loved? Surely not- Dave had light in his eyes, Marco can remember always seeing the light in his eyes- he was kind, funny, nice, all the things Marco wanted to learn to be so badly it hurt- he was never afraid of anything, he was always at parties when Marco was studying, he was the one who acted as collateral damage when Marco gave into the fall of his great ambitions and when he ruined everything in ways that made him feel so sick that in prison he would vomit, he wants to vomit, he wishes he could cry and vomit and be traumatized more because Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave, Marco’s so sorry, he’s so, so sorry, he’s-

“Marco?”

Marco jumps about out of his skin, he can feel the cells tearing as his skeleton tries to make its way out of his flesh at the sound of Jean’s too sleepy voice, guilt and shame and hatred curling in his gut fresh and new and recoiling at the sound of the voice of the man Marco wants to hide from so desperately.

“Marco, shush.”

Marco’s face shakes, resettles itself into a unified shape but before that forms a wave like it is being pulled by the shifting, sinking yellow moon.

“I am not... talking?”

Marco’s voice is wavery, just like his face, shifting and sliding like it is new and it doesn’t know how to remain solid on this plane.  Jean snorts, shifting in his sleep and throwing a hand over the side of his bunk that Marco only sees because of the shadow cast against it by the too yellow moon, so it stretches like fear and like honesty over Marco’s cabin floor.

“You’re hyperventilating.”

“Oh.”

Jean hums, and but for the lack of snoring Marco thinks he may have fallen back asleep before he speaks again.

“Unless you’re, like, jerking it or something.  Then you should shut up like 10 times more than that.”

Marco jumps again, lips pulling so tight he has to unwind them to speak.  Shame, shame shame shame shameshameshame

“I- I was not, I mean-”

“Sh, sh sh sh, okay, I know.  I am aware.  It was a joke.  Don’t shit any kittens.”

Marco’s nose twitches and he rolls onto his side, watching the mattress above him rumble about as Jean does something similar, at least Marco thinks so.  He isn’t sure, he isn’t sure, he isn’t-

“Don’t laugh too loud, now, might wake the neighbors.”

Marco lets out one of his short exhales to placate Jean as he trains his eyes in on the fire, breathing out slow as he curls his fingers into his palm, stump pressed in front of him.  He wishes he could fold his hands together- he always used to fold his hands together when he was nervous.  He swallows.  He can tell Jean can tell he is flipping his lid, he can feel Jean scrutinizing his output of air in that loving way Marco doesn’t deserve, doesn’t deserve, doesn’t deserve-

“Jean?”

Marco’s voice shivers and scatters like he is four years old and his mother is angry at him and his father has asked him what he has done to go and make her so angry, because she is unreasonable don’t you know, Marco? This isn’t your fault, Marco, your mother has a lot of stress, Marco, your mother is air in the cabin presses into Marco’s skin like the oppressive heat of the summer when his father ran away and he can’t breathe, it’s his fault, he isn’t good enough he isn’t good enough he isn’t-

“Marco?”

“Jean, I-”

His voice cracks the same as his resolve does, and he heaves in breath, and he remembers the look on Dave’s face when Marco, when Marco 17 years old, told him he couldn’t go to Dave’s house because his mother had a bake sale and he had to help because she hadn’t made her maple blondies and Married with Children would be on and his mother always watched that and Dave laughed and told him he hadn’t listened to his mother since he was eleven years old but given him a ride home because he was toogoodtoogoodtoogood

“Marco, are you okay?”

Marco breathes in and out harder, pressing his hand into a fist and wishing he could press it into the other but he’s such a fuck up he went and lost it, don’t you know? All his fault, just like his mother old him, Dave’s mother cried and cried and cried and Marco almost wished it was true Dave hadn’t talked to her because she looked like Marco had ripped him from her womb and peeled off his skin in front of her eyes _two years was not enough two years for killing my baby two years for murdering my son-_

When Marco opens his eyes Jean’s face is upside down and near his face and he is leaning over the bunk he is leaning over the bunk and looking at Marco the fire has gone out and Marco has not fixed it Marco has failed at keeping them warm Jean is angry Jean is angry Jean must be angry he must hate Marco he must

“Marco, are you-”

“I killed him”

Marco’s mouth presses closed and his eyes leak leakleakleak all of the water pressure building inside him and his chest wracks open and then down compressed by the muscles tensing over his ribs and he blubbers he blubbers like he is a little baby and his daddy is leaving at 3:47 3:47 who leaves at 3:47 daddy does daddy does daddy

“Marco? Marco, take a deep breath, you’re”

“I am. I. I am.  Am. I am- I am not, I am. He is dead.”

“Marco-”

“Dead.  He is- He dead.  He is dead, I k- I kill, I killed- Killed, him, Jean, I killed, he is Dead Dead he is-”

“Marco, Calm down, you-”

“My fault, my, mine, my fault, fault. My-”

Marco presses his hand to his eyes but he cannot cover the entirety of his red, panting, wet face, his scared, ashamed face, his longing for loneliness and hatred face without both of his hands and it is his own fault and he knows that and it draws from him a sob and then another and another until he can hardly breathe through his screwed up face and he does not hear Jean climb down from his bunk but he feels a thunb thinner than his own pressing fervently into the inside of his wrist.  He feels Jean’s hand pressing into his hand and thereby tearing it from his face and he turns away so Jean cannot see his shame but Jean does not give him the respect of looking away and Marco would resent him if he doesn’t know he deserves the shame.

“Marco, take a deep breath, you’re okay-”

“Jean, Jean Jean Jean, I am, I killed-”

“Marco”

“He never-”

“Marco, I need you to listen to me, calm down, come on, you’re”

“I, I- I am, I-”

“You’re having a panic attack, Marco, I need you to listen to the sound of my voice, come on-”

“Jean, I-”

“Sh, sh, come on-”

Marco does not watch Jean sit down on the bed beside him, but he feels it dip under another person’s weight.  His dogs gather at the edge of his bed like worried buoys caught in a wet vac but none of them know what to do- convinced Jean is the one causing Marco pain, Stella tries to rip him away and Marco does not have the will to tell her the truth because she doesn’t know, they don’t know, they-

Jean climbs into Marco’s bed and Marco is too busy breathing hard and ragged to stop him.  Jean cradles Marco’s head to his chest like he is a loving mother and Marco sobs, hard, into it, he is too busy pulling apart the skin of his sternum to object to the hands softly petting the back of his head and the soft words from a harsh mouth attempting to soothe him and contributing to his mounting guilt.

He does not remember falling asleep, but he remembers waking up warm.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm so sorry for posting this so late! I've been really very sick and I was hosting a Japanese student and didn't have a lot of time to work on it. I'm definately still continuing this because I'm really into where this is going, but I don't know it it's going to be scheduled as all hell because this is a hobby and my life is up the wazoo lately. I'm getting y wisdom teeth out next weekish and there will either be nothing or more shitty dream sequences. IDK. Feedback is really appreciated, and I'm rrrrrrreally in need of a beta for anyone whose interested!


	4. Civil isobedience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rating up because Erwin gets a nonexplicit bj. Things Happen, an most of it is not as good as I like.

Jean wakes up, for the first time, long before Marco does.  He does not get many chances to see Marco sleeping, not close up, but now he has someone taller and broader than himself curled in his arms like a child, and he has this unexplainable need to hold him, to boil out all his hurt and make him whole.  Jean never really noticed the scarring, when Marco was awake- but now Jean can see that there’s no way he didn’t lose an eye, Jean wonders if it’s harder to hunt with one eye, he wonders if he’s being ridiculous because he has seen Marco’s eyes move together and they look all the same.  

Stella does not watch them- Jean has never noticed her waking up before him, as he fails to notice many things, but Marco’s thrashing sleep did not accompany the dawn and she does not open her eyes.  This is the beginning of a long series of mornings where she sleeps far too long- where she grows more and more brittle with each passing day, where Marco does not miss her but will soon, with a new, unbearable guilt and loss.

Jean rubs his thumb over the place where Marco’s hair meets the nape of his neck- he keeps it short, buzzed, and it’s soft with length.  Marco smells like pine trees and sweat, and there’s something inexplicably warm and comfortable and good underneath it all that Jean can hardly place, but he feels warm and comfortable and good about the way Marco is spread and large and unafraid in his sleep, like he isn’t worried about what Jean is thinking or about what he himself is thinking.  

Sunlight drifts like kindness over the plains of his cheeks.  Marco is warm, Marco is safe, Marco feels like home.  It scares Jean, it doesn’t cure the loneliness he feels without internet and without other people, but it also makes him feel like his heart is full in a way it never had been before.

Jean thinks his heart, instead of beating, sucks- it vacuums up love and affection and is never satisfied.  But now, in the early rays of morning and in the warmth of the fire that has just barely gone out, with big dogs he has come to love on the floor nearby and the smell of care everywhere he can turn his head, he can manage to forget his own neediness.  He can pretend he is fine, he can ignore the hole in his chest stuffed with collected and painful memories and take peace in the peace offered to him by the dreamless sleep and careful tempo of breath Marco follows.

Jean brings his thumb up over where Marco’s neck becomes his jawline- feels his pulse behind his ear with his pointer finger and the stubble growing out of his freckled skin elsewhere.  Jean licks his lips and wipes away the weird sentiments boiling in the lower part of his chest and makes himself close his eyes- he has no right to see Marco so vulnerable, after last night, and he’s going to have a tough day if Marco shuts him off the way he would shut Marco off if he were in Marco’s position.  But he also knows Marco is someone else, someone braver and more afraid in different ways than Jean, someone who looks like this when he sleeps untensed and someone who Jean doesn’t want to risk retensing upon finding Jean watching him as he sleeps.

Jean listens to him, then- he matches his breathing with Marco and lets the warmth of his skin radiate into his loosening fingertips.  He dozes off  thinking about how Marco’s heart is slower and smoother than that of anyone else he’s known.

* * *

 

Eren presses his forehead against the crummy glass partition between his shower and his sister’s bathroom.  He feels the 90s ripples in his skin the way he feels his undercover ripples against his life.  His eyes are yellow- his eyes are green.  Yellow, green, yellow, green.  He opens them and he sees his reflection in the worn down spots in frosted glass and he knows he is not dreaming, at the very least, because his eyes are shaded green.  Yellow dream, real green-

Eren shakes his head.  Carla always told him not to let the steam get to him, not to get into it in the shower, not to do anything.  He moves back into the spray- too soft and too rough at the same time, it grates his skin and he is grateful for the abrasive clean- and presses body wash out of his too flat hair.  His cheeks ache from the grin he can’t wipe off his face.  He breathes again, harder, pushing it out as he pops his eyes open at the tile of the tub and grips his bangs so hard it pulls up the skin on his forehead.  He shivers, in the heat, he makes a noise like a wild animal and sits down hard enough to make his tailbone feel like a bruise, digging his fingernails into his scalp and dragging them over his cheekbones to leave long, spaghetti like lines down his tanned face. She was blind, dirty dirty blind, green yellow yellow green yellow was deluded, yellowgreendelusionalyellow, hallucinating green yellow-

The forest, Erwin told him, told Levi, show him the Forest, show him what he already knows- show him the people he has felt watching him, show him how wrong everyone is, show him violence and show him, show him, show him-

He was right, he told her he was right! She was a stupid fucking bitch, he hates her, she couldn’t see what he could see- no one could see what he could see.  The steam rises from his skin, he’s too hot, his therapist was jealous and lied to him and told him wrong and now, now now now he was finally where he was meant to be.  He could watch them back, he could use his special eyes and they couldn’t do anything because Eren- Eren is a superhero, just like Erwin told him, Eren was a yellow green green yellow superhero, and Erwin was going to help him take down all the people Eren was already smart enough to notice were plotting against him- Eren bites into his tongue and squeezes into a ball, he hums colors at himself and tries to remember the way the air felt on the back of his neck when he was told that he wasn’t crazy, that the birds with human mouths for beaks and the nightmarish shadows in the eaves of the witches fingers parading as pine trees and the faces he could see in the corner of his eyes and never catch, all of them were real, and Eren was special and important for noticing them.

His skin feels like its burning, and he shivers again, the steam feels like its choking him and all he can think about is his dad punching his chest to cure him of childhood asthma and Carla, Carla, Carla, stupid BITCH couldn’t believe him, not when he was right, right right right all along.

* * *

 

Marco isn’t sure what is happening to him.  He isn’t afraid, though- maybe a little, slightly terrified, but he isn’t quite afraid.  He feels like being afraid is like an inhibition- like if you are afraid of something, you don’t do it.  You don’t experience it because you are constantly holed up in a little shell- he is usually afraid.  But with these changes, now, he feels like he should be terrified- because he is excited, too, because this has a chance to be terrific as much as it has to be terrible, because he is pressing on through the vibrating in his chest like a champ and like he doesn’t mind the way Jean knows and like he doesn’t wonder about the soft way Jean has been looking at him and like he isn’t both desperate to know and desperate not to find out the why and where and when and how of Jean’s too thick eyelashes and the way he peers up through them at Marco when he pauses on his typewriter.  Jean clears his throat.

“Three minutes.”

Marco cocks his head, sitting up straighter and stirring his meat around with his fork.

“I am... I do not understand?”

“Three minutes, I said.  You’ve been staring at me like I’ve got a fucking dick hanging off my upper lip for three solid minutes.  Counted in Mississippi’s.  What gives?”

Marco pauses, shrugging softly, and bringing a piece of venison up to his lips to chew.

“I thought only kids counted miss- misses, Mississippi. ‘s.”

He looks down at the place where Jean’s feet meet the floor- his socks are woolen, patterned almost like checkerboard from where the green grey blue was worn out from his boots.  They seem homely- like they belong against hand finished wood and warmed with Marco’s fire.  Jean throws a scrap of meat to Pratt as he noses under his knee and Jean refuses to let Marco off.

“I’m getting kind of dead tired of this ‘woo woo we’re both enigmas, the secrets of the past go woosh woosh past your ears’ shit.  I’m your friend.  Probably, like, your best friend.  I don’t even know your middle name.  Now you’re staring at me like I’m going to dissipate into some mist like a fucking wizard and you want to get a spot in Ripley’s.  So what gives?”

“M-my...”

Marco sniffs, thumbing the side of his nose and putting his plate down for Stella to get at.  Fritz gets there first and Stella knows better than to plead unfairness to Marco because Marco’s shoulders are like cement and she didn’t move quick enough to get at it.

“I... I am not, not good at... That.”

Jean raises an eyebrow, crossing his legs.

“What were we gonna do today?”

Marco lets the silence sit for too long, and he can feel it sitting for too long but Jean seems to give him at least a little mercy because he doesn’t let Marco know that he’s getting impatient.  Marco wonders why he doesn’t- he knows that Jean doesn’t pity him, and he also knows Jean is a giant prolapsed anal canal with thrombosed hemorrhoids and some kind of ill conceived infected piercing.  But he doesn’t, and Marco would be thankful if it didn’t make him anxious.

“I do not... I was going to chop wood?”

“So we’re good on food and shit, then.”

“Super good.”

Jean hums and Marco curls his toes up in his boots.  Truthfully, he really did need to go hunting- there was a storm coming, he could feel the air pressure changing in his stump, and he licks his lips.  He feels like his face has been put through an electric car wash and it’s numb and cold with tingles up and down the fronts of his thighs, like he has frostbite and pins and needles at the same time.  He feels like he can hear his heart pounding in his ears, but really it’s more of a stirring, like his pancreas is oozing out hormones or whatever the pancreas does and it’s doing it right in his phlegm drowned mouth.

“Marco, listen- we’ve been having literal nonstop contact, for months.  I feel like I know you but I also feel like... Like I don’t.  And it’s kind of slaying me, a little?”

Marco stays quiet.  Jean sighs a little, and Marco thinks it’s impatience, except Jean’s eyes seem too restless as he digs the heels of his palms into them for that.  He draws up his knees the way Marco has already done and the fire crackles in the background like it didn’t realize the air needed to be still for Marco to speak.  It was warm.

“I mean- fuck, you know what? Forget it. Forget it, this is fucking stupid, I’m stupid, let’s go fucking... Chop wood.  Or whatever.”

He grunts and throws his weight like he’s going to stand, moving too fast for Marco to respond.  Or maybe he isn’t moving fast, at all- maybe Marco’s world is moving too slowly.  Marco thinks that must be it- he thinks that the way he can feel the trees moving and growing out of the ground perhaps denotes not a connection with nature and with himself he needs, but maybe that he is living hours and days slower than other people.  He realizes maybe he has not stopped time- maybe he has just slowed it down, for himself, maybe all he has done is ruined everything for himself and tried to pull Jean down into his misery.  Maybe he is living in water and never realized it because he never saw anyone else drown.

He hears wood splitting, suddenly, and it seems angrier and more ashamed and more frustrated than it should.  He worries that it will smell of sulfur and disappointment and melting metal when Jean starts it in the fire.  The rhythm feels like the ticking of a too slow clock instead of a throbbing comfort, and when Jean comes back in for food Marco still has not left his chair, fingers pressed into the handle of his hand carved prison.

* * *

 

Mikasa comes up behind Reiner with a small smile on her lips, resting a hand blithely on his shoulder.  Casually, like she had ever touched him before- he bristles defensively, a second, before forcing himself to relax and look up at her with a smile.  He’s far too careless- she saw it, just now, how dangerous he was spooked, and she knew she needed to topple him before Eren had a chance to if she didn’t want his big hands on his body instead of hers.  She cocks her head slightly, and the other two, across from Reiner, mask a threat that she can barely detect is there.

“I’m off my shift in a few minutes.”

Bertholdt sits up straight, Annie pushes her eyes into Mikasa’s sockets the way they did at the local community college and the way they did when Annie got her naked and when Annie got her happy years ago.  Mikasa responds by pulling her smile slier.  People in the diner are watching intently- they know about Mikasa’s friendship with Annie and they know that something important is happening and Mikasa’s sharp ears pick up an old woman across at the bar whispering to a friend about how sweet it was that she was soft on that guard boy.  She can smell it- smell jealousy, she can smell defensive rigor, she can just barely taste the fire hiding behind Annie’s too cool eyes as she slides in, just barely too close, next to the man Annie had no social claim to and the man Annie and Bertholdt, she knows, have an innate claim to.

“Mind if I take a seat? We’re pretty full , and I wouldn’t want to be a bother to someone I don’t know as well.”

The diner is nearly empty, Bertholdt grips his coffee mug so hard Mikasa hears his sweat slip against it.  She can feel the air, cool, on the back of her neck like she is being bathed in ice. Annie parts her lips softly, glowing pink with something between bloodlust and agony, and she leans forward on the hand holding her mug.

“Ms. Ackerman, I doubt anyone would consider you a bother.”

Mikasa laughs softly, brushing her fingers absentmindedly over Reiner’s forearm before he retracts it under the table with an unparallelled swiftness.  There is a small nod, from Annie, and Bertholdt blinks hard and forces a smile that anyone could see was fake.  His skin was normally the color of smooth yellowed ocean pebbles- it was tainted by the mahogany carved booths into something greener, fear and apprehension and jealousy like moss across his too high cheekbones.  Annie swipes some hair behind her ear, shifting to slide her hand over Bertholdt’s on the tabletop, bringing her coffee to her lips serenely.

“I’m glad to hear you think so.  Speaking of bothers, though, I heard Reiner, here, has been giving more tours than usual, difficult time of year, then?”

Reiner swallows, hard.  He is different from Bertholdt and Annie- he has two faces, he has the face they see and the face he should be showing to Mikasa, and he cannot show both at the same time without revealing something terrible and terrifying to the opposite party.  He licks his lips, smiling nervously as Annie gives him a hard look that Mikasa, observant as she is, only barely catches.  There is a closeness born from being so close for so long, you see- there is a kind of understanding people have, when they have been bound and melded together.  They come to share parts of themselves, not just in words but in mind, like they are overlapping venn diagrams no one else understands.  This is something that always gives Reiner trouble, because he can never quite tell where he and his two partners overlap and he doesn’t know how much they know or see and he doesn’t know how much other people know or see and he laughs nervously, his throat caught up in his confusion as he brings his eyes to Mikasa.

“Well, not... Too difficult.  Kids are great.”

“Oh, I just love them, too.  They’re so curious, don’t you think? Worming around in your head until they figure out whatever they like.”

Annie hums in response, just to assert she is still present.  She runs her thumb over Bertholdt’s knuckles comfortingly and Mikasa mirrors her.

“Maybe you should spend some more time with that nurse, Connie.”

“Oh, he’s an old friend.  Sasha and I, well.  We’ve known each other a long while.”

Reiner brightens slightly, losing track of his head and running on nonetheless, bounding forward on uncontrolled legs like he doesn’t need to think.  He cuts off Annie as she tries another diverting response.

“Wow, really? You should come drinking with us sometime, it’s a load of fun, I mean-”

Annie catches his eye and he looks at the table and licks his lips, laughing again and pressing his nails into the lacquered finish.  Mikasa resents it but decides it is payment for her extraction of their leader, as it is- she has figured out the dynamic, and she has figured out how to tear it apart.  She’s excellent at this kind of thing, you know- it’s how Eren’s still alive, after all.

“I would love, to, Reiner.”

She slips up, standing smooth out of the booth and dragging her fingers up Reiner’s shoulder, smiling sweetly before turning towards the register.

“Well, my break is over.  Let’s call it a date- 7, on Thursday.  Sasha’s been begging me for months, anyway.”

Annie’s eyes are steel.  Mikasa pretends not to notice- it’s for Eren, she reminds herself.  This is all about Eren.

* * *

 

“I can not say my middle name.”

Jean looks up at him slightly.  Marco doesn’t look away from his typing, moving quicker.

“It is... from the bible.  It is difficult to say, and so.. I never relearned.”

Jean puts the book he was reading face down on the arm of his chair, leaning in towards Marco a little.  He has something like interest but slightly off, like the difference between peacock blue and turquoise, glowing in his eyes.  He taps his fingers along the outer seam of his jeans and runs his tongue along his upper lip.

“Have you tried, before?”

Marco pauses in his typing, adjusting his reading glasses and breathing out a little.  He understands, now, why Jean always had to have something to do- when he was focusing on something else, it was a little easier to operate.

“Not really.  It is not... It was never important.”

The cadence of his voice is more casual than when he concentrates.  Jean’s heart swells a little in pride as he scoots his armchair more towards Marco, which creates a horrendous screech along the floor that stirs the once sleeping Newfoundland at Jean’s feet.  Pratt whines a little, but Jean dismisses him with a wave of his hand and he goes to rest, forlorn, in front of the fire with Rufus.

“Could you try?”

Marco pulls his lips into his mouth, sucking them so they make a noise when they slip back out.  He lost track of the number of commas in the sentence he is writing and he just ends it with a period because this report is already fifty pages and he doubts Hanji will mind.

“It is... embarrass. Embarrassing. So... I do not want to.”

“What if- what if I do something that embarrasses me, too, then? We’ll be even.”

Marco cocks his head a little, looking up and running his thumb over the cool plastic edge of his typewriter.  He isn’t entirely sure how to respond, but he licks his lips and says whatever comes out of his mouth anyway.

“I... I do not think there is anything, that embarrasses you.”

Jean snorts, and then puts his fingers flat against his upper lip like he wants it to be stiff but it won’t lay still.  It makes Marco smile- Jean is more relaxed, now, than he has been in a while.

“I didn’t realize you were literally the most inobservant human being to be born on this continent.”

Marco quirks an eyebrow, leaning back in his chair slightly with his stump hooked over the back.  He types a few more words, before looking back up.  He wants to pretend that typing the report is his main task for as long as he can think about a main task.  It’s a test, of sorts, to see how much he can handle.

“Excuse me?”

Jean laughs a little, letting it bounce against the wood of the cabin and roll back into Marco’s gladly receiving ears.  The fire crackles around the taste of it and Luna looks up as if she’s watching something important, something more important than a couple of grown ass men skating around each other like they’re teenagers trying not to get called on in class.

“What... What embarrasses you, then?”

Jean snorts again, waving his hand dismissively.

“Everything.”

Marco pushes his lips forward like he knows what to do with that, but then he just feels out the seam of where the plastic cover of his typewriter meets the carved wood of his table.  Jean’s eyes are bright with amusement, but his mouth is quirked with nerves.

“I am having trouble believing that, Jean. You are... shameless.”

Jean shakes his head, leaning in more conspiratorially, like he’s telling Marco a secret the dogs can’t know about.  Firelight catches his hair like camaraderie and he talks like he’s at summer camp.

“You wanna know a secret? I’m fucking... I’m terrified, all the goddamned time.”

He grins like he’s telling Marco the greatest joke in recorded history, or maybe the worst joke written in any Staten Island public bathroom stall, and continues.

“Especially with the fucking emotional shielding.  I’m literally a mess.”

He laughs a little, kicking his feet like a kid and reaching out to sock Marco’s thigh.

“So what’s your middle name?”

“I am...”

“I am? Interesting.  ‘Marco I Am Bodt’.  Your parents going for a hulk aesthetic or something?”

Marco’s lips twitch.  He isn’t ready for this- he feels like Jean is doing his best, he feels like Jean is pressing his own brand of aggressive comfort into him, but he isn’t ready for custom size emotional padding the way Jean is and he isn’t sure how to tell him. His voice starts, and it stops, and it wriggles out from between his teeth like it's a worm and he has to pull it out of the dank, hopeless hole of his struggling mouth.  He hasn’t tried, in so long, he hasn’t tried and he’s trying not to panic because he might not remember how to try.

He looks down, his eyes almost crossing in a way Jean cannot help finding endearing.  He concentrates, hard, on pushing it out instead of pulling on it, reminding himself it is him in his head and he is not watching himself struggle but experiencing it.  He has to align the words, first, the sounds, before they can come out- he isn’t good at trying hard, at that part, he closes his aching eyes to press the letters into them and Jean doesn’t talk until he feels like Marco’s ready for him to talk and Marco is so grateful for it he could die.  Marco takes a deep breath.

Zebediah- “Seven Die.”

Jean leans forward on his elbows.  He keeps his mouth shut as Marco shakes his head and presses his hand into the top of his kneecap and licks his lips, rambling out sounds like the ones he means but not the ones he means.

Zebediah “Zebra dire” Zebediah “Zed admire” Zebediah Zebediah“Sven a liar Zenbadmeyer-”

Jean raises his eyebrows patiently.  Marco closes his eyes and pauses again, breathing and moving his hand to cover his face.  He tries not to think about how his mouth feels like it’s pushing out the right words but his ears and head and heart scream at them after listening that he’s wrong, wrong wrong wrong wrong.

“Zz- Zzzzzzeb... Fuck, gosh, I am not... This is not working, it is just...”

Jean nods at him and Marco shakes his head, looking down at his feet with his shoulders against his ears in full turtle mode, curling up like an incredibly humiliated defensive roly poly bug.  It’s slow, it’s rumbly, and he isn’t sure how to make it sound like he used to say it, but nothing sounds like the way he used to say it and he tries not to care.  He chants it in his head to try to help.

Zebediah. Zebediah, Zebediah, “Zebediah.”

Jean snorts and Marco is terrified until he puts up his hands defensively, his eyes bright and fun and like Marco isn’t a failure.

“So you’re- Marco Zebediah Bodt.  That is your name.  That is what you are telling me.”

Marco looks up at Jean sheepishly and Jean responds with a shrug.

“That isn’t terrible.  At least you weren’t born “Fleur Bo Kirschtein. I mean, imagine trying to explain that to a kindergarten class.”

Jean’s eyebrow twitches up and he looks something in the exact center of nervous, anxious, terrified and excited.  He is offering something to Marco, something that terrifies him in payment for Marco letting him see his struggle.  Marco disappoints him by not knowing enough about french names to notice the secret lying beneath it’s admission.

* * *

 

When Levi comes up from the underside of Erwin’s desk, his lips shining and pink in a way Erwin was positively addicted to, pink in a way that pissed Levi off because Erwin enjoyed it and Levi was nothing if not a contrarian.

“You’re getting lazier at it.  It’s the kid?”

Levi looks up at him, indignant, jamming Erwin’s desk chair back so he can stand.

“He doesn’t have a fetish for putting his job on the line the way you do, and his dick isn’t so big it wrecked the hopes and dreams of my rectum, so really? No.”

“Then it’s Hanji?”

“You’re damn right it’s Hanji.”  
Erwin’s mouth curls, and he knows that Levi’s jaw is too steeled for kissing but he pulls him forward to do it anyway.  Levi thinks it’s disgusting, when Erwin wants to kiss him after his mouth was somewhere dirty, but Erwin loves that Levi hates it and kisses him anyway.

“They’re too sharp for their own good, aren’t they? Have you figured out their business with the forest?”

“They seem like the type to try building a fucking time machine, so maybe.”

“You don’t have to be a prick about it.  You know I love your whole double prick style, Levi, but I’m serious about Hanji.  Get on it before they get on us.”

Levi scoffs, drawing his head back as he leans into Erwin’s lap more, positioning himself to rut against the crease of his too thick thighs.  The air feels cool against the back of Erwin’s neck, and cooler against his bare lower belly.  He isn’t sure why he started this, with Levi, and he isn’t sure what it is- but he knows it means Levi is going to stay on board with him, regardless of what he tries pulling and who gets hurt by it, and he knows it means the pale blue storm in his eyes can translate into this too small town’s gray skies.

“Off the reports again?”

Erwin tips his thigh up slightly, and Levi groans in response.  His eyes go half lidded and he doesn’t give Levi more of an answer until it’s too late.

* * *

 

Jean’s calves burn- it’s worse than when he tried out for a too harsh track team in high school freshman year, its worse than the first time he walked home missing the bus in the fourth grade, it’s worse even than running to the next city to escape the threatening stare of a man with too gold eyes.  It feels like his legs are on fire- his thighs feel the way his cheeks did after getting cavities filled, and his brain is boiling with a too stubborn need not to give in and ask for aid.

He can’t help but think it just isn’t fair- Marco has thighs like a mountain climber.  Marco could probably crush watermelons or human heads between his knees with the slightest bit of pressure- Marco has calves like angry, Grecian cyclops fists above his achilles tendons, and he has feet leathered on the bottom like sewn on orthotics.  Jean has never walked this far, in his life- he has never carried anything this heavy, at least not this far, and he has never felt his lungs so bogged down with unspoken complaints about tripping on exposed roots and the severely underestimating inference he made as to the distance of a “carry in some lumber” type trip.  He hates the too fresh air hitting his smoke infested lungs, he hates the too cheerful birds picking at his aching brain, he hates the shade of the trees and the way they seem to purposefully let light just into his eyes and nowhere that actually needs warming.  He even hates the way Marco is humming to himself, like he isn’t carrying an enormous load, like he isn’t walking a marathon back to the cabin, like Jean isn’t behind him positively dying because of how oppressively bored and tired and irritated he is by all the goddamned nature shit happening near him.  

Jean had been at least given the impression that there would be a wheelbarrow or a fucking vehicle or at least the goddamned rickshaw, he had envisioned perhaps cheerfully wheeling some small dried sticks back to the cabin from at most a mile away.  But by the time he had been walking the better part of the day and they finally reached the thicker parts of the woods, his dreams had been properly crushed.  For at least an hour now his fingers have been burning against whatever the hell kind of bark this log is- it’s thicker than his own middle, barely thicker than Marco’s, who is carrying the bulk and who could probably carry it himself if Jean were more selfish.  Marco barely talks, the entire way back- the way there Jean would have given anything to get him to talk about something more interesting than different types of lichen and how they affect plant growth, but now he would be happy to have Marco make any noise that wasn’t a shitty 90s R&B song hummed out of tune.  Jean licks his lips, and he doesn’t say anything so he can avoid having to address the thick way the air acts like mugginess against his skin.  He can feel sweat clinging to the barely there, sparse outgrowth on his upper lip and cheeks, to each too thin brown hair on his arms, chilly and damp like rain soaked, once dry leaves.  All of a sudden, Marco stops, and he holds a hand out to signal Jean to be quiet.  Jean mostly just jerks forward and pries off some bark, grunting and dropping the stump to baby his hand, which causes a huge thump.

A stark white stag bolts past him- almost as if the world slows down, he catches its maraschino eyes, and his mouth goes dry.  But then it is gone- as if he paused time in front of it and failed to see it leave when hle looks up from the remote of his life.  Marco chuckles a little, and Jean looks up at him indignantly.

“That is... a friend, of mine, maybe.  I suppose he had, um.  Wanted to see you.”

Jean looks off in the stag’s direction, and his mouth is dryer.  He will think later he is crazy for thinking this, but he feels like he just received a warning- the stag had run, the beautiful and aged and inherently wise and majestic stag had fled from sound and shock and Marco with Jean, and Jean is terrified, for a second.  But then he looks at Marco, and Marco is smiling, and Jean loses all but an unsettled, cooling sweat on the back of his neck from how sunny and kind his teeth are.

“I would rather’ve met a wood nymph hottie, personally, but uh.”

Marco snickers, and then sets down his end of the log before sitting on it.  He plants his feet firm on the ground and starts working on unstrapping his prosthesis.  

“If you take a seat, we might, uh, you know. See one wandering by.”

Jean quirks his mouth to mirror Marco’s.

“Yeah, but you know, there’s also a chance we chopped down her house.”

Jean is more than happy to be seated- not that he’s about to admit it.

“Yes, well. I had to... spread word.  I have a forest wife, now, right?”

Jean laughs, shifting and sucking his teeth.

“So this is it? We’re gonna joke about me fucking things, and then me marrying you? Sounds like the weirdest crush I’ve ever heard of.”

Marco’s shoulders go up a little, with something that looks vaguely like discomfort, and Jean cocks his head.

“Oh? Don’t tell me it’s true, now? You’re ruining the image I have of you as the literal pinnacle of heterosexual vigor.”

Marco just kind of tightens his lips and draws his shoulders up.  Jean raises his eyebrows, and if they could stitch like discomfort quilts to his hairline they would.

“What, no return sass? I’m getting a little disappointed.”

Marco licks over the inside of his teeth, pressing his tongue into the place where they’re sandy, feeling the line of where the false ones are.  He paps around the outsides of his thighs and moves his feet around in the ground like he isn’t out in the middle of the fucking woods.  He’s further up the mountain than he usually is, the air is thinner, the truth peaks out easier when it isn’t muggy.

“I- Jean, could you... Please stop, for a second.  I need... something.”

Jean straightens, turning his chin a little like he’s a famous New York mobster acknowledging Marco at the door of his office on this, the day of his daughter’s wedding.  Marco waits for some kind of verbal recognition, as Jean is generally a verbal kind of guy, but he ends up being deafened for at least 2 and a half moments of chittering birds and stirring leaves and the interest of his nest and territory in his progression of personhood.

“I am... I am unsure, what I need, but it is...”

Marco licks his lips and looks up to Jean for help- he knows Jean is Queer and so Jean must be more knowledgeable on relationships and on friendships and on everything, but Jean looks like he’s open and accepting and not going to whip out the kinds of pamphlets Marco needs from the high school guidance counselor he doesn’t have.  He breathes out slowly and he closes his eyes.  The forest gets louder, and he tries to tear from its incongruous, unparseable language the kind of meaning he needs and the words he will forever struggle to bite out, but he can’t, he can’t can’t can’t.  He opens his eyes.

“I have not been... close, like this.  I have not been close, to people.”

Jean raises his eyebrows and he looks like he’s ready to say something to brush off the awkwardness Marco seems intent on injecting into the conversation, but Marco holds up his quieting hand and he licks his lips again while he thinks.

“I have not been close, but also... Happy.  Not happy, happy is...”

He swallows.

“Comfortable.  You make me... comfortable, around you.  I am afraid, but it is... it is better, different. And I do not, I do not know what to do.  I do not know what to do, because I have not done this before.”

Marco purses his lips, brows furrowing as he looks at his knees to avoid Jean.  He doesn’t know why he’s doing this now- he doesn’t know why he feels like he has to or why he isn’t terrified of it the way he was months ago.

“I... I want to.  I like it, I like this, whatever... Thing, this is, its...”

He breathes in, he breathes out in a huff like he’s frustrated but really because the conversation is forcing the air out of him like boulders on his chest.

“You, Jean, I mean. I want... I want to know your, you know.”

He pauses again, he closes his eyes because now even his kneecaps have become too condemning.

“If it is you, also, if you are... like this, to me, or not like this, I want. I want to know.”

Jean licks his teeth, breathing out and raising his eyebrows at Marco, drawing himself straight for the magnitude of the response he is going to give.  It makes Marco’s hair stand on end, makes the whirling of the forest sound like unintelligible voices somehow both without meaning and carrying shame.  Marco holds them back- holds them at bay so Jean can without fear open his mouth and speak.

Jean looks at him, looks at Marco, and closes his mouth.  Breathes out, looks down, looks up at Marco again and looks away a third time.  Marco swallows a small amount of the shame, but he knows Jean has waited for him and he will wait for Jean, if only for Jean to give something only Marco wants.

Jean laughs softly.

“Fuck, that’s, uh- heavy. Um.”

Marco purses his lips, looking back at his kneecaps as he recoils slowly, like a snail in its shell instead of a turtle.  But he is empty, empty, empty like a snail in a turtle’s shell.  He can’t hide, not really. Jean rubs his mouth, exhaling.

“Marco, I’m- I’m not good at this.”

Marco risks looking up- Jean is earnest, and Marco doesn’t understand why.

“I’m... feelings are hard, for me, okay? Really hard.  I’m not good with.... intensity, yeah? And I’m, uh- I mean I, I like you, I do, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t... I don’t think I can do more than joke about the forest wife lifestyle, okay?”

Marco covers his mouth, shaking his head, and Jean looks like he is going to apologize before he hears him laugh.

“Jean, you are... I am trying to explain you are a dear.  A dear friend? I am not... proposing, I do not mean...”

Jean flares his nostrils, flushing and covering his hands with his face.

“Fuck, shit, sorry, I’m dumb, forget it, okay? Christ, yeah, I like being friends.”

Marco scoots more towards him to bump shoulders with him.  Jean jumps but follows up with a bump in return.

“Fuck, it’s your fault, man! I mean you’re just... puppy eyes full confession like a fucking teenager, how was I not supposed to assume, you know.”

Marco snorts, pressing shoulders and smiling.

“I... I am fairly certain it was you who just confessed, like a teenager, to “liking” me.”

Jean sputters, smacking his arm helplessly.

“Like like, ing, me”

Marco snickers as Jean spends too much focus on smacking Marco and falls off the log.

* * *

 

Jean... does not know how to deal with things being so normal. Generally unwanted homosexual confessions lead to things Jean is used to, like ostracism and harassment and a shield of awkward up between him and whoever the unwitting recipient was.  But instead of distance, it seems his expression has brought he and Marco closer together- like Marco was glad for emotional honestly, like Marco knows that Jean cares about him and knows Jean won’t force anything on him he doesn’t want, like Marco isn’t even thinking about Jean having romantic inclinations.

Marco attached himself to Jean at the hip- smiled more, taught him to help can, sat with him, showed more of himself like he realized Jean belonged there with him in the cabin and wasn’t afraid of him anymore.

Jean’s confession was premature- it wasn’t a confession as much as it was a defense, as much as it was a too fast articulation of affection in what he thought was a let down for Marco.  He wonders if Marco knows that, the way Marco just knows other things, if Marco can pick up his inclinations the way he can pick up animals a mile away and wind in bare trees.  

The smell of pine is a little too strong- Jean wonders if it is because he is close to Marco or if it is because they are burning finally burning wood that he has chopped.  He is next to Marco, in his bed- they lay shoulder to shoulder, Marco is reading to him slow and Jean has his eyes closed.  Marco is still stuttering over words, having to repeat them, struggling, but he still thanks Jean for listening to him read aloud because that’s what he used to do to get better before he had no one to listen in the forest.  

Jean is unsure what the story is about- Marco has a good cadence, though, his voice is soothing and it’s dark out and Jean cannot be blamed for sleepiness, even when he is worried about relationship things that seem to have stopped being a problem for Marco.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone has problems with how I wrote the scene with Marco and you totes know what scene if you have a problem, I guessed it all based on a lot fo research but I have never had aphasia and I don't know everything about it and if you have corrections please provide them so I can make this work better. In other news, I might write something less lyrical about Jean and Marco in a psychiatric hospital because for some time while I was gone but definitely not even close to all the time since my last post I was in a psychiatric hospital and the experience made me really close to people really fast and its an experience I think would lend itself in an interesting way to Jean and Marco and plus I kind of want to talk about it a lot and get it out, so, yeah.

**Author's Note:**

> "Everlasting Light" by the black keys is basically my jeanmarco lifeblood.  
> if you wanna bother me on tumblr about continuing this, im presidentbrobama, no hyphen.  
> literally there is going to be a buttload of jean and marco helping eachother be better and if this seems kinda segmented and weird its because theres a buttload of foreshadowing and literally the backstories for everyone are long and interesting and wont be revealed in a million years so.  
> yeah prepare for literally literally literally fat hot loads of angst and marcos sad tragic past.  
> Also, as per usual, all the chapter titles are going to be completely irrelevant but easily pretentious shit around me.


End file.
